Mishra's Research Desk

A card-selection engine wearing an artifact frame, and the two clauses do not naturally belong to the same card. The sacrifice ability is pure impulse draw: dig two cards deep, keep one, spend it before your next turn ends or lose it. That much reads like colorless smoothing, the kind of thing any deck can run for a little velocity. Then unearth grafts a red identity onto it, letting the desk crawl back from the graveyard for a single-use encore before exiling itself. The friction is that the two halves cost mana at different moments: you pay to make the artifact, then again to fire the ability, then to unearth, and each activation only ever nets you one card. That deliberate metering is what keeps a repeatable impulse engine from spiraling. Note the timing seam too: the play window runs until the end of your next turn, so a card exiled off the top can be held across a full turn cycle rather than forced out immediately, which quietly rewards lands and cheap spells over expensive ones you cannot afford this turn. It is a design that answers a specific question about graveyard artifacts: how do you give an artifact a second life without making the second life free? Unearth's mandatory exile is the answer, and it makes the desk a resource you spend down rather than one you loop.