Etched Oracle

Sunburst made an artifact's body scale with how hard your mana base was willing to work, and this is among the cleanest demonstrations of that bargain. A 0/0 that costs only generic mana enters as a 4/4 only if you spend four differently colored mana on the cast, which in an artifact shell built to run on colorless sources is a genuine ask. Pay it in full and you get a body plus a stored card-draw spell waiting in reserve: pay one more generic, remove four counters, and a target player draws three. The conversion is where the tension lives, because a maxed-out 4/4 collapses straight back to a 0/0 and dies the moment you cash it in. The creature you built is the resource you spend, so as printed it is a one-shot, not a value loop. That is the half the card hands you for free, but it is not the whole story: anything that places +1/+1 counters from outside the cast (proliferate, counter-doublers, modular fodder donating its load) refills the well, and four-color fixing stops being the only road to the draw threshold. The base design is a tax on greedy mana that pays out one creature and one buy-back card-draw spell from a single generic cost; the surrounding counter toolbox is what turns that tax into something you can pay more than once.