Baton of Courage

Sunburst was the artifact-block mechanic that taxed your manabase to scale a payoff: spend one color of mana to cast it and the artifact arrives nearly inert, spend more colors and it scales up. Here the payoff is the most generic combat help imaginable, a repeatable +1/+1 pump, which makes the card a clean demonstration of how Sunburst's reward curve actually behaves. At a cost of , the ceiling is three charge counters, so the genuine decision is whether you want a one-shot nudge or a three-use pump that survives the turn and keeps drip-feeding power across multiple combats. Flash is what gives the design its teeth: you hold it up as a noncreature artifact, leave mana open, and decide in combat whether to deploy it as a surprise blocker-buff or a finishing point, rather than telegraphing it on your own turn. The wrinkle Sunburst introduces is that it checks the colors of mana you spend casting it, not the artifact's own color: the Baton is always colorless and freely splashable, yet it does nothing useful unless you feed it varied mana, so the design quietly rewards greedy multicolor piles while punishing the mono-color shells that would otherwise be its natural home. That same logic is the whole tension: the rate is a slider, and you set it when you pay, before the artifact has done a single thing.