Etherium Astrolabe

The cost structure tells you exactly who this was built for: it enters as a blue artifact, but every card it draws is paid for in black mana and dead artifacts. That two-color split is the whole point. This was sculpted for the Esper artifact decks of its era, where the board is littered with cheap colorless permanents that have already done their job and want a second use. Flash is the part doing the quiet work here: deploying it at the end of an opponent's turn means the drawing engine is online without spending your own turn to set it up, and it lets the card double as a held-up bluff of countermagic or a combat trick. The activation is slow by design (a tap, a black pip, and a sacrifice per card), so it never threatens to be a runaway draw engine; it asks for a steady stream of expendable artifacts rather than offering raw card velocity. As a sacrifice outlet it also turns artifacts with death triggers or graveyard relevance into resources at instant speed, which is where it earns its keep beyond the raw cards. It is a workmanlike piece rather than a marquee one: a converter that wants a deck already full of artifacts it would happily throw away.