Wizard's Rockets

The genre is old and well-worn: the one-mana artifact that fixes a color and cantrips when it dies, so the deck slot costs nothing in the long run. Chromatic Star and Terrarion are the lineage, each a cheap rock that filters mana and replaces itself in death. What sets this iteration apart is its mana ability's flexibility. Instead of tapping for a single fixed pip, it converts X into X mana of any colors, so it launders a lump of generic mana into whatever combination the turn demands. That is filtering, not acceleration: you never end up with more mana than you spent, only mana of the right colors. The entering-tapped clause reinforces that it is not there to speed you forward, only to smooth the turn it finally fires. Because the ability sacrifices the artifact, the filtering and the death-trigger card follow in the same motion, and both are on your schedule. The same is true of its predecessors, but the payoff scales differently here: you decide how much mana to launder and when to cash the whole thing in for a card, rather than being locked to a fixed one-mana filter. It is a small, honest piece of design that trades any hint of speed for flexibility, and the decks that want it are the ones that would rather choose their colors late than commit them early.