Dragon Engine

The pump-knight template translated to colorless: a small defensive body that scales offensively as you sink mana into it, with no cap on activations per turn. The design lifts the engine from cards like Order of Leitbur and Order of the Ebon Hand and strips the color requirement off both the body and the activation, so any deck could run it. That was the whole point of artifact creatures in this era, before color-pie discipline tightened around what colorless permanents were allowed to do. The math is where the card lives. At 1/3, the base body brick-walls the era's two-power one-drops; with two mana up it trades into most three-drops; with six mana invested it swings as a four-power attacker, and you can keep pouring mana in for as long as your mana can spare it. The rate is slow by modern standards (the activation buys raw power, not evasion or persistence), but the activation pattern itself, an uncapped mana-sink pump on a creature, became the structural bones of countless later artifact creatures and equipment. Reading it now is reading an early draft of a mechanic the game would spend three decades refining.