Soothsaying

The pricing is the whole story: top-of-library manipulation sold as a repeatable engine you keep paying into rather than a card you cast once. The variable ability scales with your investment, so the spend dictates the depth: two mana lets you peek and reorder the next pair of draws, while five arranges a full sequence of future turns in whatever order you want. The defining limit, though, is that you cannot send anything to the bottom; this is pure rearranging of the top, not the bottom-or-keep choice that scry would later codify. So the deck has to be willing to draw whatever it stacks, which makes the fixed shuffle cost the necessary safety valve. Pay it to wipe a top you no longer like, to reset after an opponent's bottoming effect, or simply to randomize past a clump of dead cards. Both abilities are activated, so the manipulation never costs you a card or a draw step; the price is paid entirely in mana, and a permanent that converts surplus lands into card selection rewards exactly the grindy, flooded board states where most decks have nothing else to do. It reads like a slower, mana-hungry cousin of Sensei's Divining Top, trading Top's draw-into-itself loop and easy artifact recursion for a permanent that creature and artifact removal cannot touch. The design predates most of the scry vocabulary that made this kind of selection routine; here the cost structure does the talking, asking how much of your mana you want to spend seeing the future.