Research Assistant

The 1/3 body is doing the heavy lifting here, and it tells you what kind of looter this is meant to be. Most card-filtering creatures are stapled to cheap, fragile aggressive frames: Merfolk Looter loots for a single tap but folds to a stiff breeze, Looter il-Kor smuggles the trigger through on combat damage but dies to anything. This one inverts the priority. The toughness blanks the early attackers that creature decks lean on, so the body earns its keep as a wall before it ever activates, and the activation rewards patience rather than tempo. The cost is the catch. Four mana to loot once is heavy by the standards of the cheaper engines, and the rate only makes sense for a deck that intends to win late and wants something to hold the ground while it gets there. The draw-then-discard mode improves what you hold without growing how much you hold: you smooth toward your answers, pitch lands you no longer need, or stock a graveyard you plan to use, one card swapped at a time with no net gain in count. That is the honest ceiling of the design and the reason the durable body matters so much. A loot effect that never builds advantage has to justify itself by sticking around, and this one is built to keep ticking long after the cheaper, flimsier filterers have died.