Throne of Empires

One-third of a regalia that almost no one ever assembled. On its own, the Throne is a slow, expensive token engine: a soldier per turn for a mana plus the tap, a rate that loses to almost any dedicated army-in-a-can. Everything turns on the reward clause, which demands a steep entry fee. Control Crown of Empires and Scepter of Empires alongside it, and the same activation drops five soldiers instead of one. The cycle is built around exactly this gap: three colorless artifacts that each do something marginal in isolation and something genuinely strong only when all three sit on the same battlefield. The catch is the assembly cost itself, because drawing and resolving three separate noncreature permanents before the engine comes online is a tall order with no built-in tutoring, no recursion, and no protection. Each of the three names the other two explicitly, a self-referential set-collection puzzle that rewards a deck willing to bend around finding all the pieces and punishes one that just jams the Throne and hopes. It belongs to the lineage of "complete the set" artifacts, payoffs deliberately gated behind a deckbuilding tax rather than a mana tax, where the real cost is the slots you spend chasing the other components rather than the mana you spend activating the result.