Serum Tank

The early artifact-matters decks wanted "play lots of artifacts" to mean something, and this is the slow, honest cash-out: a draw engine that meters itself against your own board. Every artifact that enters, the Tank included, banks a charge counter, and that "enters" clause matters more than it looks, since it catches tokens and permanents put onto the battlefield without being cast, not just the artifacts you hard-cast. But converting one counter back into a card costs three mana and a tap for a single draw, and that is where the friction lives. The engine fills fastest during the explosive flood turns, exactly when you can least afford to stop and pay three to draw, then asks you to redeem those counters in the quiet stretch afterward. That sequencing mismatch is why it reads better than it plays. The rate looks brutal in isolation, but the card's actual job is conversion: it turns a wide artifact board into a renewable resource over many turns, rewarding a deck that floods out and then grinds. Where other artifact payoffs of the period bent permanents toward damage or mana, this one bends them toward cards, just at a glacial pace. An engine on paper that behaves like a mana sink at the table, it draws the line between "draws cards off artifacts" and "draws cards efficiently off artifacts," and the gap between those two is measured entirely in mana.