Haunt the Network

The two Thopters aren't just fliers; they're the first two ticks on the counter this spell is really about. Because the drain scales with your total artifact count and the tokens enter before X is calculated, the floor is a two-point swing even in a deck running nothing else artifact-based, and the ceiling is whatever an artifact-heavy board can stack underneath it. That ordering is the whole design: a five-mana sorcery that gives you a guaranteed base rate, then rewards you for the shell you built around it rather than for anything on the card itself. It reads as a Thopter-token payoff and functions as an artifact-count drain, and the split personality is deliberate. The single-target restriction (one chosen opponent takes the life loss, you gain the same) keeps it from scaling across a wide board the way a symmetrical drain would, which matters more the more players sit across from you. Compared to the older artifact-matters drains that counted permanents on resolution without adding to the pile, the token clause here means the spell partially pays for its own X, a small but real bump that lands hardest in decks already flush with artifacts and does the least in decks that would rather be casting something else at this cost.