Worn Powerstone

The trade-off that defines fast mana from this era: a three-mana rock that produces two, but it costs you a turn to come online. Entering tapped means it never accelerates the turn you cast it; the ramp is real, but it is always a turn behind, and the colorless-only output keeps it from fixing anything. That single tap-down clause is the design discipline doing the balancing work. Without it, a three-mana rock that makes two would be a brutal jump on the curve; with it, the math has to clear the hump of a dead turn before the engine pays off, which is exactly why it sits comfortably alongside larger artifacts and big-mana payoffs rather than tempo-driven aggression. The lineage matters too: this is the template Wizards has returned to whenever it wants ramp without fixing, the conceptual ancestor of the later powerstone-token mechanic that explicitly walls colorless mana off from most spell costs. This card got there first, decades earlier, by leaning on the simplest possible restriction: come in tapped, make only the kind of mana that cannot pay for much of what you actually want to cast. The body of work it spawned is built on that one honest constraint.