Surge Node

A battery built to feed other batteries. Most charge-counter payoffs come with their own counting mechanism stapled on; this one inverts the arrangement, holding six counters in reserve and metering them out one at a time to whatever artifact wants them. The friction is deliberate: a mana and a tap per counter, plus the slow drain of its own supply, so it never floods a target the way a single big shuffle would. What it offers instead is patience, the ability to top off a charge-counter engine across several turns without the engine itself having to track anything. It exists to extend the reach of artifacts that spend counters faster than they accumulate them, the planar gates and slow combo pieces that stall a turn short of going off. On its own it does nothing but sit and wait; pointed at the right recipient it becomes a clock that only ticks when you say so. The design lives entirely in the relationship between source and destination, which is what makes it read as inert until there is something on the table that actually wants the fuel. Pull it out of that context and you have a one-mana artifact that taps to do almost nothing; put it next to a counter-hungry engine and it quietly becomes the slowest, most reliable accelerant that engine will ever get.