Tablet of Compleation

A mana rock that refuses to be a mana rock until you have paid it in time. The oil-counter tiers are a deliberate escalation: the first tap does nothing but load a counter, and only once it holds two counters will it produce even a single colorless. Push it to five and it becomes a repeatable draw engine. What that structure builds is a battery, not a ramp piece; it charges before it discharges. Since the earliest fixing artifacts, the design tension has been the trade between immediate acceleration and eventual payoff, and most rocks resolve it by simply tapping for mana the turn they land. This one refuses instant gratification entirely, spending its own activations to stockpile a resource that gates progressively better effects. The friction is self-imposed and total: every counter costs a tap, so for the first several turns the Tablet contributes nothing to the board while it winds up. The reward for absorbing that tempo loss is a card-advantage faucet that costs one generic mana per draw and never runs dry. Whether the payoff justifies the ramp-up is a question of how slow a game can afford to be, and the answer bends sharply on counter manipulation: anything that adds oil counters without spending a tap collapses the charging curve, turning a patient multi-turn investment into a fast one and letting the draw tier come online long before the Tablet was ever meant to reach it.