Chimeric Coils

Deploy it for next to nothing and it sits inert, threatening nothing and demanding nothing, which is precisely the arrangement the design wants. The X-for-X scaling is the elegant core: pay and the artifact becomes an X/X Construct, so a board full of idle lands converts into a blocker or a swing exactly as large as the turn can afford. The self-sacrifice clause is what keeps the activation honest. The Construct is gone at the next end step, so you cannot bank a giant body across turns, hold it back through an opponent's combat, or carry the same threat into a second attack; every animation is single-use and has to be spent in the window it was made. That impermanence also shapes how interaction treats it: nobody wants to spend a kill spell on a creature already scheduled to die, so the artifact deters removal rather than draws it out. What you are left with is a colorless mana sink with no floor and a ceiling set entirely by untapped lands, a late-game outlet for the deck that produces more mana than it has uses for. This is the colorless answer to a recurring design question, one that the self-animating artifacts of the game's early years kept circling: where does surplus mana go once the spells run out?