Mox Jet

An untapped artifact that produces black mana for nothing is a different animal from a ritual or a land: it accelerates without counting against the land drop and survives anything that targets lands. The math is what makes it permanently unprintable at this rate. A turn-one Mox is free mana every turn after that, paid for with a card that was already in your opening hand because the cost line reads zero. The Power Nine framing tends to flatten the cycle into a single artifact, but the Moxen are a specific design idea, and every fast-mana conversation since is a designer trying to recapture some fraction of it while attaching a restriction that makes the rate survivable: Chrome Mox with its imprint tax, Mox Opal with metalcraft, Mox Amber with the legendary clause, the Diamonds entering tapped. The black one carries additional weight, feeding the color whose best cards have always been the most mana-hungry: the Necropotence turn, the Hymn to Tourach into Sinkhole curve, the dark rituals stacked on top of dark rituals. It is the piece of the Power Nine that has been imitated most and equaled least.