Etherwrought Page

The modal-each-turn template is the whole design idea, and it's what lets the Esper colors share a single permanent without any of the three effects being worth a card on its own. Each mode is deliberately undersized (two life, one card of graveyard setup, one point of life loss spread across all opponents), but the card resolves the choice every upkeep for as long as it survives, so the value compounds against the clock rather than the board. The life-loss mode is a slow, untargeted clock; the lifegain mode buys time against aggression; surveil is the quiet one, smoothing draws while seeding a graveyard for whatever your deck does with the top of the library. None of the three demands an investment beyond keeping the artifact alive, which is the structural tension a recurring engine like this carries: it accomplishes nothing the turn it lands and everything over a long game, so its worth is entirely a function of how many upkeeps you get to spend it. The choice is genuinely one mode per trigger, not a stacked package, so the card rewards reading the board state each turn rather than autopiloting toward the same effect. Printing the engine on an artifact rather than an enchantment is the framing decision that matters most: it dodges a different slice of removal than its three colors of mana would suggest, quietly widening where a grindy three-mode permanent can survive.