Eye of Ojer Taq // Apex Observatory

Craft is the mechanic that lets an artifact demand payment in the specific texture of your board, and this one asks for the strangest bill of all: two permanents or graveyard cards that share a card type, plus six mana, to graduate a three-mana any-color rock into something that reads the shared type off its own crafting cost. The front is a plain fixer, a mana rock that produces any color at instant speed. The back is where the design logic lands: the type you chose feeding the transform becomes the type it will later cast for free, once per turn, at whatever moment you can produce a spell of that kind. Craft as a keyword usually pays out in a bigger body or a static engine; here the payout is a recurring free cast gated by a category you locked in during the transform. That gate is the whole balancing act. You are not getting a blank Omniscience-style discount: you get exactly one free spell of one type per turn, and you committed to that type turns earlier when you fed the craft its two matching permanents. It rewards a deck already stacked toward a single card type (a wall of artifacts, a glut of enchantments, a creature-dense midrange shell) and does nothing for a deck that spreads its threats across the whole type chart. The engine is real; the sequencing tax it charges is the reason it is not free.