Conversion Apparatus

Every mana rock has to answer one question: what does it cost you to turn colorless into colored? Most pay it up front, either by entering tapped, sacrificing themselves, or coming with a body that dies. This one launders the payment through energy instead. The tap-for-colorless mode is the safety net, always available, but the payoff mode (three mana in any colors) draws on a store you have to build first: three energy per activation, generated three at a time by a separate three-mana pump that also uses the tap. So the fixing is real, but it is rationed. You cannot smooth your mana every turn from an empty reserve; you spend turns banking energy before you cash any of it out, and each tap only advances one of those clocks. The design tension is that all three abilities compete for the same tap symbol, which turns a mundane fixer into a sequencing puzzle: pool energy now, take the colorless now, or spend down. Energy sits oddly on artifacts that produce mana precisely because it invites this kind of interior economy, where the rock's worth tracks how many turns you have sunk into it rather than what it does the moment it lands. This is a fixer that rewards patience by making you earn the fixing, a stranger and more honest bargain than most rocks offer.