Pointed Discussion

Would have been better if they reprinted Careful Consideration instead of this.

I think Careful Consideration is a bit too complicated for a core set.

Almost strictly worse than Concentrate.

It's like a Blue Casting of Bones that costs more and doesn't require a creature to die!

The art is...interesting, to say the least, but I kinda like it!

I remember when this card was being introduced on mtg and they were talking about the art of it. I have to say, it's definitely a good take on the effect of the card. Very few spell cards actually display what they do, and almost none do it better than this.

This might be the only card I'm willing to say is a 'fixed' Ancestral Recall:

It's splashable. Jace's Ingenuity, Concentrate, and all those other 'actually good' blue draw spells-- they don't fit easily into X/u decks- they prefer U/x decks- see the difference?

It is a 4-cost card, and there are precious few cards that give you many cards for less than 5 mana.

Cards like Brainstorm, Fact or Fiction, Gifts Ungiven, Ponder, Intuition, Preordain, Windfall, and there was this one card that made you skip a turn...have been proven to NOT be fixed versions. Simply overpowered in a different way.

Divination and similar is not good enough.

This is better than Divination, more splash-able than Tidings, and not too powerful. So this is what you get when you 'fix' Ancestral Recall. Wow.

Reminds me of Foresee. I would play Foresee over this because you can see more cards (6-3), and they have the same overall effect (essentially a draw 2). That said, there are situations where this is superior, though they occur too infrequently to justify playing this over its several alternatives.

*sigh* Guys, have we forgotten Odyssey, Time Spiral and Innistrad block already? Just use this with Flashback and it's practically as good, if not better than the alternatives.

Ancestral Recall lets you or your opponent draw three cards for . Now that's more than a little unfair, of course, so let's increase the cost to . Hmm, still an instant though... better change that too. Also, why would you ever target your opponent? That's a little silly, so let's take that out. And keeping three cards for just seems a little much, so let's make you discard one. Sounds about right, now let's print it at common.

After reading all that, this card seems pretty terrible, right? Well, it's not. This is still playable. Kinda says something about how unbalanced this game used to be, huh?

'hah! i found the red ball! you owe me twenty bucks!'

Looks like a crazy and morbid version of a shell game.