Warmaker Gunship
The entry damage scales with your artifact count, which turns a cheap red spell into an accounting problem: cast it bare and it is a small ping; cast it into a developed board and it clears something substantial. That variability is the whole design tension, and it is why the card wants to arrive late rather than on curve. Station complicates the timing further. The permanent lands as an inert artifact, so the entry trigger fires the moment it hits, but it cannot swing until you have tapped your own creatures to push it past six charge counters. Every creature you commit to that effort sits out of combat for the turn, and because the tapping happens at sorcery speed, there is no ambushing an attacker into charge counters mid-block. What you are paying for is a delayed 4/3 flier that doubled as removal when it landed, with flying switching on only after you have crewed it up. The Spacecraft frame formalizes something older designs approximated by hand: a permanent that does nothing until you feed it, then becomes a threat. The wrinkle is that the two halves reward opposite board states. The damage wants a wide artifact count; the station wants creatures with power to spare. Building toward both at once, without one starving the other, is the puzzle the card actually poses.



