Thran Tome

Nine total mana (four to cast, five to activate) to draw two cards is exactly as bad as it sounds, and the Book subtype tells you why it exists anyway: a flavor-driven artifact class invented for the Weatherlight story and its crewed brigantine of relics. The activated ability does net you two cards in hand per use, but the path is deliberately ugly. You reveal three off the top, the opponent decides which one gets buried in your graveyard, and only then do you draw two. The cards drawn are pure advantage; the wrinkle is that you never get to bin the card you wanted gone. The opponent-chooses clause is the real design tell, an early experiment in handing your foe a balancing lever over your own filtering, where a later card might weaponize that same self-mill toward a graveyard payoff. Here it just lets your opponent strip the best of three before you ever draw. What the Tome actually offered, in an era before robust card selection, was a slow grind toward inevitability for control mirrors with nothing better to do with mana. The design has aged out of every competitive context, but it survives in the artifact record as a window into how 1997 priced repeatable card advantage: terrified of it, and willing to bury it under a steep cost plus a hostile rider to make sure nobody got there cheaply.