Witching Well

The trick to a smoothing artifact is making both halves of it worth casting at different times, and this one splits its labor cleanly across the game. For a single blue mana it enters, scries two, and then sits on the board as a stored card-draw spell you cash in on a turn you can spare four mana. The early scry filters your opening hands; the sacrifice half is a late-game refill that costs nothing to hold, because the artifact is already doing its first job the moment it resolves. That deferral is the whole idea: you pay a small cost now for information, and a larger cost later for cards, and you get to choose the turn each transaction settles. It also means the card carries an artifact body around in the meantime, which matters anywhere artifacts entering or dying trigger something else. Blue has printed plenty of one-mana cantrips that filter and replace themselves in a single motion; this trades that immediacy for a two-stage payout and a permanent that sticks around to be counted. The rate is deliberately unhurried, built for decks that want their early plays to smooth draws and their late mana to convert dead artifacts into gas rather than for anyone hunting raw tempo.