Mishra, Excavation Prodigy

The looting engine has always cost you tempo: Merfolk Looter sits back and grinds card selection slowly, and the discard is a real card leaving your hand. This one rewrites the arithmetic for a deck built on artifacts. The rummage itself is unremarkable filtering, one card in for one card out. The engine is the trigger stapled underneath: pitch an artifact and get two red mana back, once per turn. That converts the loot from a break-even smoothing effect into a ritual: the activation costs one mana and returns two, so you refund the whole cost and net a mana on top, turning dead artifacts (or cheap ones you would happily bin) into fuel for whatever you cast next. A haste 2/1 asks to be a repeatable free-cast enabler rather than an attacker, and the once-a-turn clamp on the mana caps the spiral: you can only monetize the discard once, so the sequencing puzzle is which artifact to feed it and when. The design sits in a lineage of red card-selection-plus-mana bodies, the ones that reward a deck stuffed with cheap, redundant artifacts rather than a single bomb; here the payoff is not raw acceleration but the ability to loop through your deck while keeping mana open, an odd shape for a color that historically pays for its filtering with the cards it burns.