Marble Chalice

Strip every hook off the cheap value-trickle artifact and this is the chassis left behind: a permanent that turns a tap into one life, gated behind nothing and feeding nothing. No counter accumulates, no death-trigger fires, no payoff scales off it; the effect begins and ends on the turn you activate it. That bareness is the point of cataloguing it, because the skeleton is exactly what later build-arounds bolt their payoffs onto. Slot this shape next to a card that rewards each lifegain event, or one that untaps or recurs the artifact, and the trickle becomes an engine; leave it unadorned and you have the floor. The white pip is the one design choice worth a second look, since the ability is generic enough that colorless would have been the natural home. The cost reflects lifegain's standing as a white identity rather than any mechanical need for the color, and three mana for a tap-for-one is a steep tax by any era's standard, the kind of rate that only makes sense as deliberately minimal filler. What remains performs precisely what it states and leaves the reason to gain that life entirely to the deck around it: a low-commitment permanent meant to round out an artifact-matters or incidental-lifegain shell, valued not for the point of life but for being one more cheap body of an artifact for the cards that count them.