Prototype Portal

The whole appeal lives in a single ratio: four mana to set it up, then a recurring tax that scales with whatever you imprinted. Imprint a Sol Ring and you mint a fresh one for one mana each turn; imprint a costly bomb and the activation price climbs with it. That sliding cost is the entire balancing act. The cheaper the imprinted artifact, the faster the engine spins, which steers builders toward the smallest, most repeatable pieces (mana rocks, equipment, cheap utility artifacts) rather than the splashy expensive target the card superficially invites. The tokens are genuine copies, so any enters-the-battlefield trigger on the imprinted artifact fires every time you activate, which is where the engine stops being a slow grind and becomes a loop. The real friction is the up-front commitment: the artifact you imprint must already be in hand when this resolves, so the deck has to be built to have a worthwhile blueprint in hand at four mana, and once chosen, the choice is locked. As a piece of artifact-copy design it sits apart from the clone tradition: not a single flexible imitation in the mold of Phyrexian Metamorph, but a permanent factory keyed to one chosen template, the cost of changing your mind being a second copy of the whole apparatus. It rewards a deck saturated with cheap, ability-laden artifacts and offers almost nothing to a deck that wanted a one-shot copy of something big.