Black Mana Battery

This cycle was an interesting little set of artifacts. Like many of the set's iconic cards, these were very playable when they were printed (though not quite tournament-worthy) -- but they haven't aged gracefully. There's already an updated version of these, released in Future Sight:

But Mirrodin's artifact charms echo the mana batteries, too, in that they're artifacts with on-color themes. There's also Ice Cauldron, a wonderfully arcane card with more rules baggage than an OCD ex-hooker; while it does something totally different than the mana batteries, it's an artifact that stores colored mana and (kinda-sorta) casts spells. (Think of it like the biggest spellbomb ever.) All of these were cool ideas that I wanted to put together.

I shied away from the 1-a-turn mentality of the original cards; similar designs, such as the song-enchantment cycle in Urza's block, are a little too slow for my tastes. The current design could be used to fix mana, but I'm not too worried about that -- spending 3X to get X black mana isn't exactly efficient. The bigger fear is using the mana batteries to create explosive turns, especially in heavy control decks. This is definitely a design I'd have to test before unleashing it on the world.

Other abilities I pondered for the Black Mana Battery included removing cards in graveyards and killing a creature with converted mana cost X or less; I settled on fear because unblockability is one of Legends' subthemes.