Pyramid of the Pantheon

Most mana rocks pay for themselves on the second tap; this one demands you go three turns into the red before it ever clears the price of admission. The first ability is the toll: every activation costs two mana to make one, a net loss of a mana each time, while it slowly stacks brick counters toward the threshold. Only at three counters does the payload unlock, and then it converts the whole investment into a sudden burst: three mana of one color from a single tap, with no further upkeep. The design is a deliberate inversion of the usual ramp curve, front-loading the cost and back-loading the reward, which makes it a wager on the game lasting long enough for the patience to mature. It is closer in spirit to a ritual you have to build by hand than to a steady mana source: the early turns it slows you down, the later turns it pushes you ahead of where a comparable rock would leave you. The tension is entirely about tempo against ceiling. You are spending real resources and real turns to manufacture an explosive mana node, and whether that math works depends on a single question the card itself cannot answer: how long will you be allowed to keep priming it before the payoff arrives.