Root Out

Green's disenchant, reprinted under various names since the game's earliest years, has always carried a quiet identity problem: it does exactly one thing, and that thing only matters when the opponent gives you a target. This is a design answer to that conditionality, though it never solves the targeting requirement itself. Like every spell in this lineage, it still needs a legal artifact or enchantment on the battlefield to cast; it will happily hit an artifact creature, an enchantment creature, or any other permanent that carries one of those card types, but against a board offering nothing to point at, there is no fishing for the Clue. What the Investigate clause changes is the payoff when the answer does connect. Instead of trading one card for one permanent and walking away even, you destroy the target and bank a deferred cantrip, so the exchange tilts in your favor on the turns the removal is live. The cost is honest: you pay an extra generic over the bare disenchant rate, and the Clue is not free card advantage, since cashing it demands its own investment down the line. That structure softens the maindeck cost of running a narrow answer, because the spell is no longer a pure one-for-one when it fires. It sits among green's hard answers to artifacts and enchantments, distinguished not by what it can destroy but by the residue it leaves behind once the target is gone.