Wood Sage

A Tempest-era attempt at a self-contained tutor that takes its toll in selection risk: name a creature, dig four deep, and whatever you fail to find lands in the graveyard rather than back atop the library. The activated ability is a study in pre-modern design caution. It can pull multiple copies of one name (a genuine selling point in an era when decks ran their best creatures as playsets), but it commits you to choosing before you see, so the four-card peek is just as likely to bury three cards you wanted as it is to surrender the one you named. That blind-naming clause is the balancing friction here: the cost is not mana (free once the body resolves) but the loss of everything the dig touches that does not match the name, dumped into the yard with no way to get it back. On a 1/1 with summoning sickness gating the first activation, the effect arrives slow and conditional, the kind of grindy value engine that read better on paper in 1997 than it played. What the design quietly anticipates is the graveyard payoff: feeding a yard while assembling a hand is a tension later sets would build whole archetypes around, but Wood Sage offers no outlet for what it discards. It is a tutor and a self-mill engine sharing one body without the synergy that would later make that pairing dangerous.