Sage of Lat-Nam

The original blue artifact-sacrifice outlet, and the template every "sac an artifact, draw a card" effect has been measured against since. The design does two distinct jobs at once: it turns spent artifacts into a resource you actively want to fill the board with, and it gives blue a sanctioned way to convert permanents into cards without bending the color pie. That second job is the load-bearing one. Blue had card draw before, but it did not have a repeatable engine that ran on cheap artifacts you already wanted in play; the sacrifice cost is paid in the same artifacts that fueled the era's blue-artifact decks, which made the line read less like a cost than a synergy. The lineage runs straight through Krark-Clan Ironworks shells, through every Goblin Welder build that wants to recur an artifact after drawing off it, into Daretti and Urza engines, and on into the modern conversation about how cheap artifact-fueled card draw is allowed to get. The two-mana 1/2 body is almost beside the point; the engine is the activated ability, paid entirely in a tap and a sacrifice with no mana attached. The tap is the real governor here: it gates the draw to one card per turn cycle, which is the discipline that kept the rate honest for thirty years. A foundational piece of blue-artifact design, and one that has never needed an erratum to keep doing its job.