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Moxonomy

Terror Ballista

Artifact Creature — Construct7 generic mana

Seven generic mana buys a removal engine dressed as a beater, but the sacrifice clause is the hinge: the construct wants to swing into a board it can eat, converting your own creatures into targeted kills the moment it is declared as an attacker. That trigger fires on attack declaration, before blockers are chosen, so the destroy effect never depends on the construct surviving combat or the attack connecting. Menace pushes in the same direction from another angle: forcing two blockers or none means every profitable swing either eats an opponent's body outright or clears a lane, and it protects the attack from a single chump. The asymmetry is what makes the sacrifice palatable (you feed it your own creature, an opponent's creature dies), which is why it belongs in sacrifice-fueled shells where the eaten body was already spoken for, turning a construct with no colored pip into a black-adjacent kill machine. The color identity surfaces only in the graveyard: unearth for 3 generic manaBlack manaBlack mana returns it with haste for one lethal swing before exile, so the removal trigger can fire again even after the body has died once. A colorless removal engine is dangerous precisely because any deck can hard-cast it, so the recursion that grants a second attack is gated behind two black mana. That gate is what keeps the reusable version an honestly black effect rather than a free rider in every artifact deck.

Terror Ballista (bro)
BRO · #290rare
Pricing
Normal: $0.26
Foil: $0.28
Oracle Text

Rules text

Menace Whenever this creature attacks, you may sacrifice another creature. When you do, destroy target creature an opponent controls. Unearth 3 generic manaBlack manaBlack mana (3 generic manaBlack manaBlack mana: Return this card from your graveyard to the battlefield. It gains haste. Exile it at the beginning of the next end step or if it would leave the battlefield. Unearth only as a sorcery.)
Legalities

Format Status

Standard
N/A
Pioneer
Legal
Modern
Legal
Legacy
Legal
Vintage
Legal
Commander
Legal
Pauper
N/A
Brawl
Legal
Historic
Legal
Alchemy
N/A
Timeless
Legal
Standard Brawl
N/A
More formats
Old School
N/A
Premodern
N/A
PreDH
N/A
Pauper Commander
N/A
Oathbreaker
Legal
Gladiator
Legal
Penny Dreadful
N/A
Duel Commander
Legal
Future Standard
N/A
COMPETITIVEBRAWL
Legal
TLR
N/A
Printings elsewhere

Other printings

1 set
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