Clockwork Gnomes

Regeneration sits at the center of this design, treated as a renewable engine worth building a creature around rather than the defensive afterthought it later became. The tax is steep: three mana and a tap to save a single artifact creature, payable only when both the mana and the body are available, which means the protection competes directly with whatever else the turn wanted to do. That friction is the whole point. Homelands arrived at the tail end of the period when Wizards leaned on regeneration as a repeatable resource worth dedicating a slot to, and a dedicated regenerator that targets the same card type it belongs to was meant to anchor an artifact-creature board this set never actually supplied. The ability reads "target artifact creature" without "another," so the Gnomes can save themselves; that small mercy is the only protection they natively offer, since the rest of the board has to exist for the engine to mean anything. The narrowness is otherwise total: nothing against exile, bounce, or sacrifice, and the rate sat well behind where it needed to be even for the time. What it represents is clearer than what it does: a snapshot of how slowly artifact-matters synergy paid out before regeneration got cheap and the support cards arrived to make a repeatable engine worth the cost.