Barrin's Codex

Patience taxed twice is the mechanic. Each upkeep you bank a single page counter, and cashing out costs four more mana plus the artifact itself, so every page represents a turn you spent not advancing the board, and the payoff still costs as much as the rock did to play. That double tax is the design discipline: the draw scales linearly with how long you let it sit, but the longer it sits the more committed you are to a turn where you do nothing but refill. It is a slow battery from an era that also gave artifact decks much faster ways to convert mana into cards, which is why the Codex reads as the conservative, fair-rate version of the idea: no shortcuts, no cheating the timer, just one counter per upkeep until you decide the hand is empty enough to justify the eight-total mana sink and the sacrifice. The flavor frame is exact, too: a book whose pages accumulate before you read it all at once. Where most early-era card-draw artifacts either dripped one at a time or paid out a fixed lump, this one let you set the size of the lump by choosing how long to wait, and priced that choice steeply enough that the engine never threatened to dominate a game on its own.