Tower of Champions

Eight mana to pump a creature once is not a rate anyone builds around; it is a mana sink, and that is the entire point. As one of the colorless utility artifacts in the original Mirrodin's mana-rock-adjacent toolkit, this exists for the long game where a player has flooded out and needs something, anything, to convert surplus mana into board presence. The activation cost is deliberately punishing: at four to cast and eight to fire, it asks for twelve mana across two turns before it does anything, which prices it out of any deck trying to win quickly. What it offers in exchange is repeatability and color independence, a way for a creature deck running dry on threats to turn a single attacker into a clock without committing more cards to the board. The +6/+6 is large enough to matter in combat math and large enough to push a creature past most defensive walls, but until-end-of-turn keeps it from snowballing. The design reads as a relic of an era when colorless artifacts were expected to be expensive and slow, paying for universal access with a cost curve that only patient, mana-rich decks could afford. It fills the gap of the inevitability engine for the grindiest builds, and largely sits idle everywhere else.