Scientist Supreme of A.I.M.
Storm engines usually live in red or on the stack; this one bolts a copy effect onto a two-mana Dimir body and gates it behind a life payment. The clamps are where the design earns its keep: the ability you copy has to be activated or triggered from an artifact source, the copy fires only during your turn, and only once per turn. That trio is what keeps a runaway loop off the table. A single high-value artifact activation gets doubled with fresh targets, and the two-life cost is the meter that stops you from treating it as free. The interesting axis is what actually qualifies, and the parenthetical does real work: mana abilities are excluded, so the obvious cheap fuel (sacrificing a Treasure for mana, tapping a rock for mana) is off by design. What remains is the deeper artifact toolbox: an equip that draws, an artifact that pings on tap, a Vehicle's attack trigger, an activation that scries or drains, anything you were already running now firing a second instance for a self-inflicted paper cut. Because the once-per-turn cap makes quality the currency, the deck wants the single best non-mana artifact ability available each turn, not raw volume. Nobody is casting a 2/2 to attack; what two mana buys is a repeatable, targeted copy stapled to a permanent, a fundamentally different resource from the one-shot copy spells that usually do this work. The life, not the mana, is what the card taxes.
