Font of Progress

Mill two, pay three, tap, repeat: that is the whole loop, and the counter framework is precisely why it stays a trickle rather than a threat. The oil counters here are load-bearing. They enter fixed at two, with no printed way to add more, so the mill total sits at two per activation unless another effect changes the counters. That ceiling marks the line between this and the reusable engines that fuel real self-mill or deck-out plans, where scaling output is the entire point. The activation cost matters more than the cheap front-end suggests: three mana every turn buys grinding that will never race a dedicated engine and never touches a life total. What the design actually offers is repeatability on a hard-to-remove permanent, a different axis than raw throughput. As a noncreature artifact it can tap the turn it enters, shrugs off creature removal, and grinds indefinitely with no upkeep or setup. Within the oil-counter cycle it reads as blue's low-key contribution to the theme: a durable but slow tap engine rather than a payoff that grows the counters it holds.