And yes, you can get any card (say a Jyhad vampire) into your hand, but we hadn’t figured out how to get it into play.
A clever use for it at the time was to bring in a powerful but reasonable custom made card (preferably one with novel, interesting effects) and then cast that. This was especially cool at the time since this was before Tempest. Power creep was not yet noticeable and they hadn’t gotten in to the really wild mechanics of the later expansions.