Welcome back to another Card of the Day segment!  Today, we’ll be taking a look at one of my favorite underrepresented artifact cards.

Sunburst showed up quite a bit in the Fifth Dawn expansion, and for the most part it turned up on some pretty worthless cards (Suntouched Myr, anyone?), which were made even more worthless by the fact that spending one each of more than two colors of mana on one card is generally rather hard to do.  Of the 16 cards printed with the Sunburst ability, there were only a couple good ones.  Etched Oracle is, by far, the best.

This is really a fantastic card; the only issue with it as it stands alone is the fact that you need to take full advantage of its Sunburst ability in order to be able to draw any cards.  Luckily, there are plenty more ways in Magic to get +1/+1 counters on a creature than just Sunburst, and if you make good use of them, you may even be able to keep the Oracle around to continuously use its ability.  Creatures with the Modular ability work well with this card, as well as the Simic guild creatures from the Dissension expansion who move +1/+1 counters around.  If you wind up having to send the Oracle to the graveyard, you can just use Skeleton Shard or something like that to get it back.  Even if you don’t pour four different colors of mana into playing this guy, you should be able to get him up to four or more counters using other methods with little difficulty.  Usually, you should be able to make him at least 3/3 when he comes into play, and he can grow from there.

I could go on for a while singing the praises of this guy, but I think you get the gist of the idea that drawing three cards in one go is a pretty damn good thing.  This guy helps out tremendously in pretty much any sort of deck because he can dig for multiple options at once.  He was better when combat damage still used the stack (since you could pop him in response to lethal damage and still get 4 damage across), but he’s still amazing because he’s very easily reusable (remember, you don’t actually have to sacrifice the Oracle, just remove 4 counters from him, so if he has more than four counters, he lives!).  Don’t overlook this guy if you’re looking for different options for card advantage in your deck; Etched Oracle can get the ball rolling with amazing speed and efficiency.