Preordain

The selection-versus-velocity dial, set exactly where it gets banned. Drawing a card while filtering past two off the top is a deceptively complete package: you smooth your draws, dig toward your gameplan, and replace the card you spent, all for a single blue mana at sorcery speed. The scry-then-draw ordering is what makes it sharper than a raw cantrip. You see two cards before you commit, bottom what you do not want, and then draw into a deck whose top is now arranged to your liking, so the card you pull is already informed by the choice you just made. That sequencing turns one mana into a noticeable bump in consistency across an entire game, not just a single replacement effect. The trouble is that this kind of cheap, repeatable filtering does its best work in exactly the decks that least deserve more consistency: combo and spell-dense control shells that want to assemble a specific configuration and hit it reliably. It has been banned in Modern for precisely that reason, the verdict being not that it does anything flashy but that it makes degenerate strategies too reliable too often. Ponder occupies the same slot with a different bias toward raw card selection over guaranteed bottoming; this one trades a sliver of that for the certainty of putting unwanted cards out of reach permanently.