Metrognome

The discard clause is the joke and the design: an artifact that pays you back specifically when an opponent's spell or ability forces it out of your hand. This is a card built to punish the discard suite of its era, the Hymns and Mind Twists and Duresses that stripped hands clean, by turning a successful disruption into four bodies for you. Note the precise wording: it has to be an opponent's effect doing the discarding, so cycling it yourself or pitching it to your own rummaging gets you nothing. That narrowness is the entire point. The tax ability, paying four mana and a tap to assemble Gnomes one at a time, is filler attached to a contingency. The card mostly sits in hand as a tripwire, hoping to be attacked. Most cards reward you for being proactive; this one rewards you for being targeted, which makes it a strange kind of insurance policy rather than a threat. It is the sort of cute, conditional artifact the late-90s sets produced in bulk: a clever interaction with no reliable way to engineer the trigger, since you cannot make an opponent discard your own card on demand. The result is a token-maker that only fires when the table cooperates, which is to say almost never, and a curiosity that reads better than it ever played.