If we're pushing Thopters towards , prehaps this would be better without the Steampowered.

Compare this to Seller of Songbirds and you can see why the Steam powered is interesting.

White gets steampowered too. Worth looking at it as a cross-archetype card.

Yeah, the problem is the Steampowered trigger pushes the card in the wrong direction. Steampowered pushes the card toward , since that's where more reliable colorless mana production is likely to be found due to the combination of 's land manipulation and the Component theme making you want to run more artifacts and therefore more mana rocks.

The problem, is we want it to push in the other direction, towards ; Steampowered doesn't do that, atleast not in this card's current iteration.

You seem to be forgetting that is getting ramp in the form of Colorless mana rituals and what not. ( Overheat style)

It's true that both and have access to colorless mana as one of their major themes in this set, but look at it again.

­'s Colorless mana comes in large, quick bursts such as in Burst of Steam, Generator Servant,and Overheat. All of these are trading card disadvantage for a massive burst in steampowered potential.

­'s Colorless mana, on the other hand, comes in a small, long-term increases in your colorless mana, as seen in Industry Guy, Mana Purification, Steam Factory, and Streamstress. All of these provide slower, but more consistant colorless mana production instead of the quick spikes that come with 's versions.

That's why I said the Steampowered clause on this pushes more towards rather than , yes you could use the quick bursts of mana from 's bursty cards but that'd be inefficent for such little gain, since you'd be using 2 cards to get 2 creatures and you might not always have the bursty mana cards exactly when you want to use them. 's more consistant colorless mana is far more efficent for something like this, as they are repeatable and you're more likely to have dropped them earlier so you can use them when you need them, since they are permanents.

Fine. But see it like this: If we make it not Steampowered and keep it at this cost, we have, first of all, to push it back at 1/2 so we don't powercreep Seller of Songbirds. But it still does, since both her and the 'bird' are artifacts.

By keeping it this way, you play for a 2/3 or for a 2/3 and a 1/1.

I guess my point is that by remove Steampowered, we break everything that allows us to make this card in a way that reference Seller of songbirds.

Having just discovered Meshblade, I think this might be better a Colorless Artifact Creature and the Meshblade being 's creature contribution to the archetype (with Midnight Thopting being the cross-archetype card from ,) while this becomes its colorless counterpart.

Besides, Seller of Song Thopters wouldn't been it's final name after development and all, so any reference to Seller of Songbird would be lost eventually anyway.

With or without steampowered? Also I feel like we could use it in place of Midnight Thopting but not in addition to.