Spoils of the Vault

This is a tutor that bets your life total on variance. Most black tutors fix a price up front: Demonic Tutor costs two mana and a card, Vampiric Tutor costs two life flat, Diabolic Intent costs a creature. Spoils of the Vault names none of that. It will find any card in your deck, no restriction on type or count, for a single black mana, but the cost is whatever the top of your library decides to charge. Name a one-of and you might pay a life or you might pay twenty before you hit it; the variance is the entire balancing mechanism, and it scales inversely with how many copies of the named card remain in your library. That makes the card a calculated gamble rather than a tutor in the usual sense: it is at its safest when you have thinned your deck or have multiple copies of the target, and at its most lethal when you are digging for a singleton with a full library underneath it. The other wrinkle is the exile clause. Everything passed over is gone, not milled, so it punishes graveyard-reliant builds and quietly thins your remaining draws. The result is a tutor that reads as a combo enabler precisely because of its recklessness: in a deck that wins the turn it assembles its pieces, paying a chunk of your life to guarantee the find is a price you only have to survive for one more turn.