Skull Catapult
A sacrifice outlet that converts a creature into a fixed two damage at any target, for a colorless engine cost that any deck can run. The design is firmly of its era: four mana to deploy, then a mana plus the tap every activation, with the creature itself as the real fuel. That pricing is what dates it. It asks you to pay full freight at every step (the artifact, the activation, the body) for a damage output that later aristocrats payoffs would hand out for free as a passive death trigger rather than charging a tax per shot. The wrinkle worth holding onto is the targeting: "any target" means the catapult can throw a creature at a planeswalker or a player, not just trade in combat, which gives it a slow inevitability as a reach tool when the board has stalled. It also turns recursion shells into a repeatable ping: a creature you can bring back is a creature you can keep firing. But the cost is an activated sacrifice, not a free death payoff: the creature has to die specifically to this ability to produce the two damage, so a body lost to combat or removal yields nothing. What it offers, then, is a colorless way to point sacrifice value at the face in colors that lack a native outlet, at a deliberate per-shot tax that the modern free-outlet template has long since abandoned.




