Oath of Jace

The Oath cycle ran on a split contract: an enters-the-battlefield payoff any deck can use, and an upkeep trigger that only pays if you are actually fielding planeswalkers. The blue entry leads with the universal half, a filtering burst that sculpts your hand regardless of what else is on the table. Cast it and you have spent a card on the enchantment, drawn three, and pitched two, netting flat on card count while trading through a chunk of your library toward the piece you need. That dig is what makes it the most generically playable member of the cycle; the scry rider scales with a board state plenty of decks never assemble. The draw-three-discard-two shape matters here: you shed from your whole hand, not just from the fresh three, so the surplus can bin dead weight instead of forcing you to ditch what you just drew. That is smoothing, not advantage; it swaps quality for quality rather than adding to your count. The upkeep scry, scaling off planeswalker count, is the clause that justifies the flavor, yet it is also the half that most often goes uncashed. The enchantment delivers its full filter the turn it lands; the recurring scry demands a superfriends board before it pays anything at all. With no walkers it scries for zero, which is to say it does nothing, leaving a three-mana selection spell with a permanent stapled uselessly to the battlefield.