Hornet Cannon

Token-makers that produce expiring bodies are a recurring artifact-set experiment, and this version is among the bluntest: pay four to drop the engine, then pay three more and tap each turn to manufacture a flier that exists only until the next end step. The math tells the whole story. Each Hornet costs three mana and a full activation cycle for a single point of flying damage from a body that evaporates before it can attack twice. The haste clause is the one concession that makes the rate function at all: without it, a token made on your own turn to attack would sit idle, since it would expire before it could ever swing. So the card front-loads the value into the moment of creation, a swing now rather than a permanent on the board. That self-destruct clause is also where the design discipline lives. A repeatable, untimed token engine at three-and-a-tap would be a genuine resource advantage; capping each Hornet at one turn of relevance turns it into a slow, expensive trickle that drains your mana rather than building your position. The result is an artifact that promises an army and delivers a single mosquito per turn, the kind of clean, honest, and ultimately overcosted design that early artifact sets produced when they were still working out what repeatable token generation should cost.