Granite Shard

Two ways to pay for the same point of damage, and which one you choose says everything about the deck you put this in. Three generic keeps the artifact firing in a build with no red to spare, a colorless utility piece that asks nothing of your mana base; a single red turns it into a bargain, freeing up the rest of your mana for the turn. That dual clause is the design's reach: indifferent to color, but quietly cheaper when you happen to be in red. The tap is the limiter that keeps either mode in check, capping it at one point per turn no matter how much mana sits open, so it never tips into a mana-fueled attrition engine. What separates it from the long line of Tim-style pingers is where the damage comes from. A creature pinger has to survive a turn of summoning sickness before it earns its keep; a noncreature artifact has none, so the point is live the same turn it resolves, provided you can cover the activation. It belongs to an artifact-block ethos of cards built to function anywhere while paying a small dividend to the color that wants them most, the red mana mode here being the gesture rather than a demand.