Brass Infiniscope

Mana rocks do not usually come with strings attached, which is exactly where this one earns its slot: the tap for two colorless is ordinary filler, but it arrives bundled with a delayed reward keyed to whatever X spell you sink that mana into. The intent is transparent. It services the deck built around big X payoffs, the fireballs and hydras and mass-drain spells that scale with available mana, and it keeps those decks from feeling like they spent a card on ramp alone. Cast the X spell later that turn and the Infiniscope hands back a card and life proportional to the X you paid, so the bigger the payoff, the bigger the compensation. The friction lives in the coupling: the trigger fires only on your next X spell, and only this turn. It does not stockpile, it does not carry over, and a turn spent ramping without a target to spend into wastes the rider entirely. That restriction is the whole idea. This is ramp built to refuse dead-weight status in a deck committed to X, and it goes inert in a deck that is not. As engine glue for the X-spells-matter archetype, it performs one function cleanly and demands that the deckbuilder already know they want it.