Rejuvenation Chamber

Lifegain on a meter: the tap ability does what a small lifegain rock has always done, but two fade counters put a clock on it. You can squeeze up to four activations out of the artifact before it sacrifices itself: once the turn it enters, once on each of the two upkeeps a counter comes off, and a fourth time by responding to the sacrifice trigger as it sits on the stack during the final upkeep. Fading is a discount mechanism dressed as a drawback, a way to print effects the game would not otherwise allow by guaranteeing they expire. An untapped artifact that gains two life every turn forever would be a problem in any era, so the counters exist to make the rate legal rather than to punish the controller; the clock is the price of admission for getting the effect cheap. What's left is a deliberately humble engine, a slow-burn life buffer for the kind of grindy, defensive deck that wants to outlast an opponent rather than race one. The card never asked to be a centerpiece. It was built to be the unglamorous gear inside a machine that wins by attrition, and the fade timer is exactly that: temporary by design, useful while it lasts, gone before it can become an engine in its own right.