White Mana Battery

Storage mana, paid up front and spent in a burst. The design idea is a temporal arbitrage: trade tempo now (two mana plus a tap, on a turn you might otherwise cast something) for a deferred mana spike later, with the charge counters acting as a visible meter that opponents can watch filling. The drawback is honest and structural: the artifact taps to charge and taps to release, so it never produces mana the turn it adds a counter, and you have to choose between building the reserve and spending it. The cash-out itself is a mana ability, so it does not use the stack and can fire at instant speed; the friction is not when you can release the mana but how long the battery has to survive to be worth releasing. That fragility is what kept the cycle balanced at four mana in an era when fast mana was being printed with far looser restrictions: the battery has to live through multiple turns of artifact removal before it pays off, and a single Disenchant erases the entire investment. The cycle (one per color) is an early, uncluttered expression of a pattern Magic would return to repeatedly: counters as stored resources, with cards like Astral Cornucopia and Everflowing Chalice working the same shape later. The white version is the least exciting of the five, because white rarely wants a single-turn flood of its own color; the long-game payoff the battery was built for is exactly the plan white was not yet allowed to have in 1994.