Probe

Draw three, discard two: that is the whole base mode, and the math is the point. It is strict card parity rather than advantage, spending the spell itself to trade three draws against two discards and land on the same hand size you began with. What you buy is selection, not volume, the looting effect blue has always used to dig toward answers while pitching lands and dead cards. The optional black half changes the axis entirely: pay the extra cost and a target player discards two cards of their choice, converting a private hand-sculpting play into one that also strips an opponent's resources. The discard is not random and it does not exempt your own two-card cost (those still hit the bin), so the kicked payoff is a clean swap of your selection for their cards. That split is the deckbuilding tension this design always poses: the floor is a serviceable smoothing play that asks nothing of your manabase, while the ceiling demands a true two-color foundation to ever unlock. The early-era lever of stretching a single card across a wider band of the curve is on tidy display here, with mono-blue card filtering on one end and a black-pip disruption mode on the other. Whether the second half earns its slot, or whether the card rides on its reliable single-color base and treats the discard as a rare bonus, is the question it keeps handing back.