Synod Artificer

Built for a world where artifacts were everything: Darksteel sat at the tail of the artifact-saturated Mirrodin block, and this Vedalken was Wizards handing blue a wrench for that machinery. The two activations read as the same engine pointed in opposite directions, but their use cases are completely different. The untap mode is the combo half: point it at a mana rock or a tap-activated artifact and you get the effect again, paying X for as many noncreature artifacts as you want to refresh at once. The tap mode is the control half, a way to shut off an opponent's artifact mana or freeze their tap-to-activate engines before they fire. What dates the card is the noncreature restriction, which puts artifact creatures off-limits for both modes. The 1/2 frame is deliberately negligible: this is a utility piece whose value is entirely in how many artifacts surround it and how badly you want one of them tapped or untapped twice. It belongs to the lineage of blue artifact-tutoring and artifact-manipulation tools that the block leaned on, a scalable, repeatable lever rather than a single-shot trick.