Wurm's Tooth

One of the five color-hosed lifegain artifacts from Darksteel, each keyed to a different color's spells: Wurm's Tooth watches the green half of the table. The design logic is pure sideboard-era thinking, a holdover from a time when artifacts were the universal answer slot and incidental lifegain was treated as a real defensive resource against aggressive single-color decks. The trigger is keyed to casting, not resolution, so the life accrues regardless of whether the green spell ever lands; it also fires off opponents' spells, which is the wrinkle that makes the card a passive tax on a green-heavy table rather than a personal value engine. The trouble is the rate. One life per green spell, on an artifact that does nothing the turn it enters, is a clock measured in dozens of triggers to matter, and the lifegain-matters payoffs that would justify stacking those triggers were not the cards green's casters tended to play. The cycle survives as a teaching artifact and a curiosity: cheap, colorless, and instructive about how Wizards once priced incidental life against a metagame defined by mono-color aggression. Where lifegain has since become a build-around axis with dedicated payoffs, this remains a card from before that conversation existed, gaining life one spell at a time with no second clause to turn the total into anything.