Pointed Discussion

Absolutely sick how great this card is.
Vampiric Tutor is sick and this card often does it one better, in that it also lets you manipulate the order of your 4 next cards.

Throw this into any Cascade and/or Ripple deck and go to town!

Even at about a 4.1, this card is tragically underrated.

I found a single copy of this some time back, skimmed over it without reading... then I found it again, read it carefully this time, and then read it again, and then again, in shock. Shock caused by the pure awesomeness that is this card. I gave it 5 stars. This thing is a beast, a true king of deck-stacking.

How did I ever skip past this card before? Why isn't it on lists of "awesome cards you should use"? A great mystery, if you ask me.

Perfect for any deck that needs to find the right cards during the game. Imagine, if you spent 5 life during resolution, you have already searched half of your library and stacked 5 cards you need and might need next turn. This card being an instant makes it great. No question, it's a 5-star card for me.

This is one of the rare times where I had to read the card rulings to get past the wall of text. But OMG!!! This card is INSANE!! Very underrated! This little baby hides under the radar!! For 2 mana at INSTANT SPEED!?!? This easily hits on the top 10 list for the best tutors of all time. I am so glad I stopped to read this card...

If you read the card text backwards, it specifically says that this card is worth 5/5 stars.

Tutors are nice for netting you a card you want. For two mana and a piddling investment in life, this gets you five cards you want, in the order you want.

Maybe this Lim-Dul guy is on to something.

very good indeed. I got one and always overlooked it, when I went back in serious magic business I made sure to include it in my tourney deck

I use this in my casual Pyromancer Ascension deck and it works so good to get me where I need to be, which is having PA on the next few turns.

Interestingly enough, if the number of cards in your library is not divisible by 5, with infinite life you could get any 5 cards and put them on top of your library with enough filtering. Of course by that point you should have already won the game...

The card itself though is very powerful and captures the essence of blue in library manipulation and black self-destructive win-at-all-costs mechanics.

It occurred to me that if you put an Elixir of Immortality in a deck with this badboy, you can go through your deck until you find an elixir, stack that section, play the elixir, use the elixir, recover your lost life and the vault - and repeat all over...

Fantastic card, no doubt.

The one thing I never quite figured out, though, is what is going on in the illustration. I can see that there's light falling on a tome, with bookshelves in the background. But I can't tell what that bony protrusion is in the bottom-left corner. Sometimes I look really hard, and start to see fragments of faces and arms, but nothing ever seems so pronunced that it actually looks like it was intended to be there. What does everyone else see?

One life?

I guess the lesson they learned from Necropotence was a hair too late to help them with Alliances.

HOLY SHIT!!! HOW HAVE I NOT HEARD OF THIS????

5/5

@ tcollins - any five cards consecutive at the time you begin vaulting, that is: there is no shuffling until the end.

this is an instant damn this is awsome.dark confidant is crap compared to this.

Played a Sedris, the Traitor King EDH a while back, and I would giggle with joy every time this was in my opening hand. This is an amazing card, especially when you're in a format where you have more life than you know what to do with. Easily a 5/5

Almost an instant speed Demonic Tutor. Nom nom.

This card needs to be in every single UB EDH deck ever run. It's usefulness in a 100-card, single-copy format cannot be overstated.

Just beautiful. 5/5.

This was the card I was excited to get when I didn't get a Force of Will or Balduvian Horde.

Alliances was pretty awesome.

I like cards whose first ruling starts with: "In other words..."

This card is great.

Personally, I like to hold it in my hand as long as possible. The moment my opponent thinks I'm down to nothing, I toss this out and ask them to take a short break while I set up my next 5 turns up.

Pulled off the greatest shit ever w/ this + wheel of fortune + mind twist the other day. used this to stack the mind twist in my next draw, emptied my hand, cast the wheel to fill our hands, and then made my friend discard nearly his entire hand with mind twist. Thank satan for dark rituals. Granted, i could have filled my hand and emptied his with just mind twist and necropotence, but this way made me feel like a sir. True story

@scumbling1 - I assume that it's supposed to be where Lim stores all of his unused stuff (parts of unfinished skeletons, old spellbooks, etc).

I immediately ordered a playset online. I'm replacing my demonic tutors with these diamonds.

So it's basically a Demonic Tutor+Ponder+Scry 5, for 2 mana (the two most power IMO) and at instant speed? And it's completely un-restricted?!?!?! 4? Yes please!

If one person knocks this card because it doesn't also let you draw, Lim-Dul will reach out and smack you!

For how much everyone is gushing over this card, how come we never really saw it in tournament play? Better options at the time? Either way, I have to agree that it's pretty damn useful. Maybe we'll get a functional reprint in Gatecrash- it seems like a very Dimir-y card.

Start your turn with MIrror Universe in play. During your upkeep, play this card and pay all of your life but 1.

5/5, any day of the year.

Maybe one of the best cards I have ever encountered for Legacy play. At the very least, it's a Cruel Tutor & Index with flash. This is a universally legal "any card" tutor for 2 mana. Demonic Tutor, Demonic Consultation: illegal in Legacy, and for good reason.

Already 5/5. The following is just a potential bonus.

In clarification of a prior controversy, Corey_bayoudragonfly is mistaken; tcollins is correct:
This can get you any 5 cards, not just 5 cards consecutive at the time of resolution.

Keep in mind, with a library count indivisible by 5, you are not stuck with distinct, immiscible groups of 5. Every complete loop through your library allows you to migrate your desired 5 cards a little closer to each other. Once they are consecutive, it's just a matter of time before they surface as a group.

Granted, this is just hypothetical. Even if you're perfectly efficient, with around 50 cards in your library (but not a number divisible by 5), it could still take around 10 passes through the whole thing to both gather your 5 cards and wait for them to surface together. So we're potentially talking upwards of 100 repetitions of the process described on the card, and thus upwards of 100 life as well. Doing the math, it comes out to exactly... 1 very annoyed opponent (more in multiplayer).

However, in the event that you have a ridiculous excess of life, you and your opponent could always just agree to take this card to read something like ", Pay 100 life: If the number of cards in your library is not divisible by 5, then search your library for any 5 cards and exile them. Shuffle your library and put the exiled cards on top of it in any order." Now read that effect out of context and tell me honestly that the border of the card it came from isn't silver.

But if I were your opponent, I'd be inclined to make you play it out as punishment for not just using a Doomsday.

This goes in my accent deck.

So I just built a Blue, Red, Black deck. I have Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker, Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas, Liliana Vess, and Sarkhan the Mad. I think I'll get a play set of these instead of Demonic Tutor and I'll take out my Augur of Bolas. Anyway, combo Lim-Dul's Vault with Sarkhan's draw ability to get around the downside of not being able to draw. It might kill him, but if you're running these colors, you should know that Nicol Bolas gives power to those who will abuse it most.

The best part is, it's a 2 CMC INSTANT. You cast it at the end of their turn. You can even put it on an Isochron Scepter. Gorgeous.

"Start your turn with MIrror Universe in play. During your upkeep, play this card and pay all of your life but 1."

Or better yet, start your turn with Near-Death Experience and use Lim-Dul's Vault while the trigger is on the stack.

It's impossible to deny that this card is powerful but it's also the kind of card I don't like, especially in EDH where I'm seeing it crop up a fair bit.

It just slows down the game having everyone wait while you sort through that many cards, deciding if you should throw them on the bottom or how you want to sort them. It's a solitaire kind of card, and that's not what, at least amongst my friends, EDH is about. I would always prefer a Fact or Fiction effect over this in that format, if only for the interaction.

It's like a super Index that sets up your win condition. A WINdex, if you will.

Here is a link for how to explain how much life it takes, and how you are going to tutor any five cards that you want:
http://magicjudge.tumblr.com/post/84947444344/if-ive-gained-a-trillion-life-through-an-infinite

If there are 49 cards left in your library, it takes, at most, 160 life to tutor any five cards that you want. make sure you don't try this with 50 cards left!