Watcher in the Mist

Surveil needed a clean rate to anchor its introduction, and this is that anchor: a flyer whose entire job is to make the mechanic feel normal at common-to-uncommon power. The 3/4 in the air carries more weight than a filtering effect usually justifies. It walls the small evasive creatures a controlling deck wants to stall against, trades up or holds the skies, and comes with its keyword pre-installed rather than bolted on. The surveil 2 does double duty depending on the shell: in a deck that wants threats, it digs past lands and dead cards; in a deck that wants its graveyard stocked (delve fuel, flashback targets, reanimation fodder), the bin-filling is the point. That second mode is where surveil separates itself from scry, and it is worth stating the mechanic precisely: scry sends rejected cards to the bottom of the library, out of reach; surveil sends them to the graveyard, where they stay live as a resource. Both let you keep the good ones on top. The difference is what happens to the ones you do not want, and surveil's choice to bin rather than bury turns every trigger into a small read on whether a card is more useful drawn or discarded. A five-mana 3/4 flyer that filters two cards was never built to headline anything, and does not pretend to. It is the replacement-level glue that lets an evolving-air strategy function: a body, an evasive keyword, and a filtering trigger, all in one clean package.