The Hive

Ten mana and two turns buys the first Wasp; fifteen and three buys the second. The rate would barely qualify as a token engine today, but that math was almost beside the point in Alpha's "big colorless artifact" school, where the promise was a permanent that turned mana into a long game by itself. The design is doing something the early game rarely tried: selling an artifact as a slow, repeatable token factory, an engine that compounds across turns rather than spending itself in a single use. The flying clause matters more than it looks. In a period when most ground forces had no answer to evasive chip damage and reach barely existed as a keyword, a stream of 1/1 fliers was a genuine win condition for a deck with no creatures of its own, and the artifact frame meant any color could run it. That combination (colorless, repeatable, evasive, inevitable) is an idea Wizards kept circling back to: Tetravus and Triskelion as colorless threats, Mishra's Factory and the later creature-lands as permanents that double as bodies, the whole tradition of artifacts that win by attrition. The Hive is the crude early sketch of a problem the design team has been refining ever since: the artifact that, given enough turns, wins the game by itself.