Vexing Bauble

A tax that ignores mana entirely. Where earlier stax pieces raised the cost of casting things (Thalia, Guardian of Thraben asking for one more; Sphere of Resistance taxing the whole board), this one asks a different question: was any mana spent at all? If the answer is no, the spell is countered. That single clause turns the artifact into a hoser for a specific and increasingly common way people play Magic, the free spell: pitch-cost cards paid for by exiling or discarding, alternative costs that read "you may cast this without paying its mana cost," cascade hits, and the whole family of zero-mana disruption that has become a pillar of high-power play. It does not tax those decks; it shuts the relevant spells off outright, and it costs a single mana to deploy so the pilot can still function on the same axis. The symmetry is real but rarely felt, because the deck running it is built to spend mana and its opponents often are not. The second ability resolves the tension every hoser carries: what to do with it once its target has left the board. Rather than sit as a dead permanent, it converts itself into a card, sacrificing to draw. The two abilities pull in opposite directions by design, one a persistent cast-trigger that hangs over every free spell, the other a terminal cash-out, so the artifact never fully outlives its usefulness.