Tomakul Scrapsmith

The mill-three-then-choose structure hides a small piece of self-balancing design that most enters-the-battlefield value creatures skip. Milling three of your own cards is not a cost paid up front; it is a selection window, and the card hands you a fork based on what turns up. Find an artifact and you take it, converting a dead-body 2/1 into card advantage. Whiff on artifacts (or decline the ones you hit) and the creature grows itself instead, so the trigger never fully fizzles. That "if you don't" clause is the load-bearing bit: it guarantees a floor. A pure impulsive-draw effect would leave you with nothing on an empty pull, but here the counter absorbs the miss and turns a 2/1 into a 3/2 that survives more of the board. The self-mill is doing double duty, too, seeding a graveyard for artifact recursion while it digs. What the card is really asking is whether your deck is dense enough with artifacts to want the card, or thin enough that you would rather bank the counter, and it never leaves you empty-handed either way. That is a tidy answer to a persistent problem with red's card advantage: red rarely gets to draw clean, so it draws conditionally, and this design makes the condition pay out no matter which way it breaks.