What do you do with the land card?

Tricky card to cost. Ideally, you want players to be able to cast and activate this card for as cheap as possible so they can pick up their early lands. But, man, some games in limited will be dominated by an early theodolite, allowing its controller to just curve out. Sometimes, though, this artifact will be useless.

Other features include brushing past cards you don't want on the top of your deck (note to self: Include a card that lets you look at the top card of your deck often and in common) and the ability to zoom through your deck if you don't have many lands... you might actually get to your Salvage cards again without shuffling if you keep activating this thing. Unlikely, but, you know, if you have a powerful salvage rare it might be worth it.

But the cost... hmm... I'm not sure, but I think this is fine. The name bugs me, though. I probably should drop the word 'Mirran'. I don't like to 'waste' good words... but I doubt Magic will feature many theodolites in the future.

It stays on top of your deck. But you're right, Link... many people won't assume that. Editing.

Removed the word 'basic'. This card is hard enough to employ... it might as well let you dig for your Urzatron, if that's what you're trying to accomplish with it.

Yeah, this is interesting. The only normal maindeckable use is for reliably drawing lands, but it's nice that it has theoretical other uses for getting to your salvage cards.

It's not really going to let you "curve out" since you have to pay to use it. But it's potentially useful in a deck that wants to get to the late-game, either in Limited or conceivably even in Constructed.

I'm going to test this at and . It feels a little too easy with that cost... but I can't imagine any way that this card would be considered broken, besides in combination with goofy combo decks. We'll see if it can take the abuse.

Sounds fine to me.

I've been thinking of this card as it stands... and it may be broken. Part of the reason it doesn't seem that way is because we've been thinking of what it does to normal 23 land decks. Not very impressive. But, if instead you put four of these in a deck with 14 lands, and mulligained if you didn't see a land and a Theodite, or 3 lands in your openening hand... well... I don't know. we'll see.

Hmmmmm. True. It's not like you're gaining card advantage, though - you have to spend a draw step drawing those lands. And you're effectively playing 1 turn behind because you're spending 1 mana drawing your land. It might be worth it for some decks... weird 14-land control decks that don't mind having a bit less mana on the earlier turns, if they can play like 28-land control decks. As you say, worth playtesting.