Bloodletter Quill

Card draw on an artifact has always been a question of how the cost scales, and here the price is a debt that compounds. The first activation costs a single point of life; the second costs two, the third three, and on it climbs, because the bleed tracks the counters you keep stacking on the quill. Left unchecked, it becomes a self-immolating engine, each card more expensive than the last in the only currency that never refills on its own. What makes this a guild artifact rather than a colorless one is the escape hatch: a Dimir-colored ability that scrubs a counter off, letting you reset the meter and ration the loss. That two-step rhythm (draw now, then later spend mana to walk the debt back down) is the whole tension. The body is colorless, so anyone can run it, but only the blue-black player gets the off-switch, and that gap decides who can run it at full efficiency: the deck whose colors include the reset pays a manageable toll, while everyone else watches the meter run away from them. Read it as an early-era experiment in life-as-resource card advantage, kin to the painful draw spells of its time, but metered through a counter the controller can choose to forgive.