Preferred Selection

Watch how green used to flinch at the idea of refilling its own hand. The enchantment costs four mana just to begin working, and then it does two contradictory jobs depending on which price you're willing to pay each upkeep. The free line is pure smoothing: look at the top two, keep the better one on top to draw normally, bottom the other. That repeats forever and never grows your hand, but it costs nothing. The expensive line is where the actual card advantage hides: sacrifice the enchantment and pay another four mana to pull one of the two straight into hand, after which the engine is gone for good. Eight mana and a full turn's patience, total, to convert this into exactly one extra card. The split is the whole design: a filter you keep indefinitely versus a one-shot draw you buy by destroying the machine, and the math leans so hard toward the former that the latter line is almost theoretical. It reads as an early attempt to give green a tool for a problem green was rarely trusted with (turning excess mana into cards), built before the color pie had settled on how steeply to tax that effect outside blue. The result hedges against its own generosity at every step: it shows you two, lets you keep one for free, and demands a fortune the moment you want that card in your hand instead of on your library.