Sol Grail

Three mana for a rock that taps for a single color, chosen the moment it resolves, with no flexibility to pivot once the board shifts. That pre-commitment is the design tax that makes the rate honest: you pay full price to lock the choice in, and you live with it. There is none of the on-cast scry, the incidental lifegain, or the late-game modality that later mana artifacts folded into the same slot to justify the investment. The card taps for exactly one color, the one you named on entry, and nothing more. By the standard of its era, a colorless artifact that could produce any single color of your choosing was a genuine concession to multicolor decks with few other ways to smooth their mana without warping toward green; by every standard since, three mana for a one-color rock is a rate the design pace of the game has comprehensively outrun. Reading it now is mostly an exercise in measuring how far the floor for mana artifacts has dropped: a snapshot from a moment when fixing was scarce enough that a rock this plain was worth a card and three mana to play.