Sandstone Needle

Two red mana from a land, twice, and then it's gone: that's the whole transaction, and it's the cleanest illustration of the depletion-land design Mercadian Masques built a full cycle around. The bargain is front-loaded burst against guaranteed attrition. You pay for the acceleration with a land that enters tapped (so the explosive turn is always one step behind) and a hard expiration date encoded in those two depletion counters. Every activation is a tick toward sacrifice, which means the card punishes you for treating it like a real land and rewards you for spending it fast, the way you'd spend a ritual rather than a permanent. That framing is the point: this is closer to a stored Rite of Flame than to a Mountain, a one-time fuel cell that happens to occupy the land slot rather than the spell slot. The depletion mechanic never caught on, partly because the math rarely beats just running basics over a long game, but the design question it poses is still a sharp one: how much immediate mana is a permanent's permanence worth? Sandstone Needle answers in the most aggressive terms its cycle allowed, trading every drop of longevity for two windows of double red.