Pyrite Spellbomb

The cheapest insurance policy red has ever printed. The artifact costs one to deploy and then sits idle on the battlefield, banking a decision until you know which mode the board demands. Against creatures or a low-life opponent, it cashes for two damage at instant speed. Against an empty board or a flooding draw, it cycles for a card and never costs you the slot. That two-mode design (a removal half priced in red, a replacement half priced in generic) anchors a long line of modal sacrifice artifacts: an early cycle that handed each color its own version of the same template, a removal-or-cantrip drop tuned to the color's identity. The colorless deploy cost is what lets it travel between decks: pay the red later, or pay the generic and pretend it was never a burn spell at all. The friction is that both halves require sacrificing the artifact, so you get one use and one choice, and the card forces you to read the game before you spend it. What keeps it relevant decades later is not the rate (two damage for two total mana is unremarkable) but the optionality folded into a one-mana drop: removal that refuses to be a dead card, and a cantrip that occasionally kills something. For decks that want to thin air out of their early turns without committing to a mode, it remains a quietly perfect filler piece.