Steam Augury

The Fact or Fiction template, recolored into blue-red and printed a generation after the original. The bones look familiar: reveal five, two piles, you keep one and bin the rest. But the roles are swapped, and that swap is the whole design. On Fact or Fiction, the opponent builds the piles and you choose; here, you separate the top five into two piles and the opponent chooses which one you keep. The pressure lands on the splitter, not the chooser. You are forced to assemble two stacks you would be equally content to receive, knowing the opponent will hand you the worse one. The quality of the spell is decided by how well your five can be carved into two near-equal halves: a top five with one bomb and four blanks lets the opponent simply give you the blanks, while five live cards make every cut painful for you to draw and trivial for them to exploit. The added red pip is the curiosity. Card-filtering of this shape had lived comfortably in mono-blue, and stapling a red requirement onto a recolored effect narrows where it can go: a reminder that color identity is sometimes the only knob a near-reprint gets to turn. As card advantage it is an uneasy bargain, instant-speed and digging five deep, with the friction baked into your own hands. Skilled pilots learned to engineer splits where the graveyard half feeds recursion, so the pile they lose is the pile they wanted to bin anyway.