Sphinx of Lost Truths

Cast it for five and a 3/5 flier shows up dragging Compulsive Research behind it: draw three, then loot away three from the hand you just refilled, a sorting effect for decks that want a deep, churning hand and a fuller graveyard. Pay the extra and the discard clause simply evaporates, leaving clean three-card advantage on a body sturdy enough to wall most early aggression and start chipping in the air. That fork is the entire point of the design: the same spell is a tempo-neutral loot when mana is tight and a card-advantage engine when it is loose, and the decision lands on cast rather than at deckbuilding, so the card answers the board in front of you instead of committing in advance. The discard reads less like a drawback than a price tag with two settings; a 3/5 with flying is durable enough that the looting mode almost never costs you the creature, so you pay in selection, not in survival. The honest tax sits on the kicked side, where seven total mana buys the value before flying ever swings, and the body, sturdy as it is, makes for a slow clock. This is the patient blue dig-and-flier: it sorts hands, stocks graveyards, and holds the ground for decks that win by assembling the right half of their library rather than racing.