Well of Knowledge

A symmetrical card-draw engine, and the symmetry is the whole point. The activation belongs to everyone, but the timing clause locks each player to their own draw step, the one window when they can dig for extra cards. That single restriction does an enormous amount of design work: it stops the artifact from becoming a free repeatable draw machine for any controller with mana to spare, because each player can only use it during a phase most players blow past without a thought, on their own turn, after they have already drawn for the turn. The friction is real. Two mana per card is a steep rate, and you are paying it inside that narrow draw-step window. What you are actually buying is a shared resource that you, the deckbuilder, can wall off: pair it with anything that punishes drawing or anything that lets you act on an opponent's draw step, and the symmetry stops being symmetrical. It hands the whole table a button and trusts the timing rules to keep the parity from helping anyone too much, the kind of group-resource design that reads as quaint now but was genuinely unusual when it landed. Most symmetrical artifacts of its era helped whoever was already ahead; this one rewards the player who builds to break the balance it pretends to offer.