Augmenting Automaton

A colorless one-drop that grows only on black mana, which is the whole trick of it: the body is castable in any deck, but the pump button locks the card into black. That split is the design point. A 1/1 artifact for a single generic costs nothing to slot, so it reads like fixing-agnostic filler, but the firing mechanism (a two-mana investment for +1/+1 each time) is a mana sink that only a black deck can fully use. It is the kind of construct that looks like a builder-friendly artifact and behaves like a black creature, repeatedly turning leftover mana into a bigger threat across a long game. The activation has no per-turn limit, so a flooded board late becomes the card's reason to exist: every untapped pair of lands is another step up the curve for a creature that arrived as a chump. Nothing about the rate is exciting, and nothing was meant to be; this is mana-sink design at its plainest, a body that scales with how much black you can spare rather than with how much you paid up front.