Omen

A study in how Portal explained card selection before the game had a word for it. The two halves of this sorcery are pure scry-and-draw: arrange the top three, optionally shuffle them away, then refill. That second clause is the tell of its era. Modern templating would let you simply leave the cards or scry them to the bottom; here the only escape valve is a full shuffle, which throws away the very information you just paid two mana to gather. The "you may shuffle" line exists because Portal predated the scry keyword by years and had to spell out top-of-library manipulation in longhand, and the design erred toward giving the player an out rather than committing them to a sequence they might dislike. What lands on the page does roughly what a cantripping scry 2 does, but with clumsier ergonomics and a worse rate: three cards seen instead of two, no graveyard or bottom interaction, and a draw stapled on. Read it today as a fossil from the years before Wizards settled on clean, keyword-able card selection: proof of how much compression scry actually delivered once it arrived. The effect is sound; the wording is a museum piece.