Automated Assembly Line

Energy has historically lived in artifact-heavy midrange, so wiring the counter directly to artifact-creature combat damage closes a loop older energy designs left open: the payoff and the fuel come from the same board you already committed to the red zone. The trigger is batched, not per-creature: connecting with three artifact creatures against a single player in one swing still nets exactly one energy, so the engine rewards repeated turns of aggression rather than one big alpha strike. That shapes the deck. You need artifact creatures landing hits across several combats, which pushes toward a token-and-metalcraft shell rather than a generic go-wide plan, and each 3/3 Robot the sink produces becomes another body that can carry the trigger next turn. The token entering tapped is the brake on the whole thing, forcing the investment to pay off a turn later and keeping the generator from converting into a fresh attacker the same turn it fires. The cleaner trick, relative to earlier energy pieces, is self-sufficiency: it is both the accumulator and the sink in one two-mana artifact, so a deck can run it as a standalone value spine instead of splitting the energy economy across a support cycle. The color is the quiet concession. White rarely gets to manufacture its own recurring threats this cheaply, and gating the whole operation behind artifact-creature damage (a plan white does not naturally assemble on its own) is the restriction that squares the cost with the payoff.