Puresight Merrow

Most filtering bodies tap to do their work; this Merrow inverts that, spending the untap itself as part of the cost to peek at the top of your library and exile what you do not want. The inversion carries a hidden prerequisite: you cannot fire the ability from an open board, because the creature has to already be tapped before the has anything to stand back up. The attack step is the natural way to get there, which quietly turns the body into a beater that converts each swing into one act of selection. Wringing more than a single look out of a turn means finding something that taps it back down between activations, so the has fresh work to lift; each of those repeat looks still costs its hybrid mana on top, so the loop is paid for in both re-tap effects and raw mana rather than in untap-friction alone. The 2/2 hybrid frame is incidental to all of this; what is actually on offer is a tempo-bound smoother whose throughput is gated by how often you can put the body back to sleep. It is a small puzzle of board states that almost no other utility creature has to solve, an early-era experiment in attaching a recurring filter to the friction of needing to be tapped first.