I think, that cards like this are one reason I started to play nothing else but cube. This is pushed so far, it is just disgusting. It is not good design, really bad design actually, to make rares or mythic rares interesting just by pushing there stats further and tacking on extra keywords. Yes, rares should be allowed to be better than un/commons, but because they have more interesting and complex abilities and more build-around-potential. This card feels like a 11-year old designed it after his wet dream, where he beat all his friends in middle school with that demon. No color should get a 6/6 flample for 5 without an drawback, that's just like breaking a gentleman's rule.
For this problem child I would suggest "When you have less cards in graveyard than any opponent, sacrifice this", which would bring a dynamic between surveilling and, well, killing/milling/discarding your opponents stuff.
I don't know what it is with WOTC and Surveil with this set, but there are a
lot of cards that interact with this mechanic. Take a look at these new cards:
Obviously not Cubeable unless you have a significant As-fan of Surveil stuff, and even then probably not worth it. My point in bringing these up is that wizards really wants surveillance to be a thing in GRN limited.
As I was writing this bit, this card was previewed:
Holy crap the potential for value here is real. Depending on how many surveil cards end up being cubeable I could see this being playable as well. While it's definitely not efficient, the fact that you're only gaining card advantage after the first activation makes this a lot more palatable to me. Probably not for my cube, but fun at the prerelease for sure.
Right now, we know about 17 cards that can surveil. Of those, I would say about 10 could be played in a medium powered environment. Of those, 3 cards allow you to get a surveil
every turn. Judging by the fact that we still have about 3 and 1/2 days of previews left, I would be willing to bet we will see at least a few more playable cards. Am I necessarily saying that we should all be running a surveil matters theme in our lists? No, of course not. What I
am saying is that this mechanic is probably deep enough as to where one could run a card that cares about surveillance and have it actually matter. Remember the
Blood Operative we saw yesterday? You could probably run that and have it's surveil clause matter if you wanted it to.
I probably just like this mechanic too much, but it looks
so fun to play with!! I think this is probably the best job WOTC has done with the Dimir guild, and it may very well end up being the best Guild mechanic overall.