Drill Too Deep

Modal instants that graft an aggressive floor onto a build-around payoff are an old trick, and the split here is a clean one: naked artifact removal on one side, a burst of five charge counters on the other. The second mode is the reason the card exists, since it fast-tracks a Spacecraft or Planet toward its counter threshold at instant speed, letting you fuel a payoff on an opponent's end step or in response to a removal spell aimed at your artifact. That instant-speed window is what separates it from the sorcery-speed engine cards that usually do this kind of loading; you get to hold up a decision until you know whether the counters or the destruction matters more. The counter mode does nothing without a Spacecraft or Planet already in play, which is the tension every modal card of this shape lives in: the mode you want is the mode that needs a board, so the destroy-artifact half is the insurance that keeps the card from being dead when your engine is not online. It is a purpose-built accelerant for the counter-matters subtheme first, and a serviceable piece of red interaction second, and the value proposition rests entirely on how many turns those five counters actually save you.