Eye of Ramos

One of five artifacts in the Ramos cycle, each a shard of the dragon engine, each tapping for a single color and able to immolate itself for one more pip of that same color. The blue fragment looks like a colorless rock that mimics a Sky Diamond or a Mind Stone, but the two abilities are independent: the tap and the sacrifice are separate costs, so in a single turn you can tap it for blue and then crack it for a second blue, a one-shot burst of rather than a single recurring pip. That distinguishes it from the fixed rocks of its era, which only ever drip one color per turn. The catch is the rate. Three mana for a permanent that makes one blue is overpriced against the two-mana rocks of the period, a tempo loss you accept only because the sacrifice clause is hiding in the same shell. The cycle existed to recombine into Ramos, Dragon Engine, which rewarded casting spells of every color and stacked counters onto itself, and the burst-of-two trick reads as a small nod toward enabling a multicolor splash to assemble it. The fragments never found a payoff worth the cost, though, and outside that reassembly fantasy they stayed curiosities: a deferred two mana of fixing wrapped in a body too expensive to want.