Telim'Tor's Darts

Two mana and a tap buys exactly one damage, pointed at a player or planeswalker and nothing else: a rate that tells you, plainly, this was never meant to win in a hurry. The math is the whole argument. The activation is too expensive and the payoff too small to function as a clock, so what the design purchases with that inefficiency is permanence and reach. No creature removal answers it, it asks for no colored mana, and it sidesteps the creature board entirely to tick away at a player or planeswalker turn after turn. That is inevitability sold by the increment rather than the lump sum. The lineage is pure early-Mirage instinct: load minor utility onto colorless permanents so any deck can run them, the same reflex that gave the era its surplus of mana rocks and artifact pingers. The targeting clause keeps it from ever becoming a tempo tool; there is no creature to kill, no spot removal to spend it as, only slow pressure aimed at the head. It belongs to its moment's design vocabulary far more than to any format it bent, an artifact built for patience in an age that still considered two mana for a point of damage a turn an honest trade.