Hopefully this is simple enough for a common. It is basically a huge battery that you can drain a little bit at a time. Very bad in a draft but great in the right constructed deck. Also synergises nicely with Solar Prism. At it's worst its another cost Artifact for Metalcraft.

I considered making this a mana sink and either having it tap to give itself counters and then pay mana to move them around or vice versa. In the end I felt this version best suited the flavour. Artwork would be a dilapidated solar collector artifact that was slowly draining of power.

So far it's only been uncommon (and once per set in the artifact blocks) - Power Conduit, Coretapper, Energy Chamber, Vedalken Infuser and Surge Node. But Steady Progress was common, and I don't see quite why this ability needs to be uncommon. Of course, you do need a large quantity of charge-counter artifacts for this to be any good at all in Limited, otherwise they'll collect up at 14th pick.

True Given the number of artifacts in this set it may be wiser to pull this card.

Pulling this and replacing it with something else.

This card is now a simple enabler for effects that care about snow permanents.
I'm not sure if the effect is too powerful for its cost - I was going to have it cost , : but decided I'd try it out in this simpler form first.

I wouldn't expect any problems (if anything I'd think it might not be useful, but it probably has some combination). Probably the best uses are (i) making a land snow for snow mana (ii) giving Ronom Hulk protection from something (iii) activating one of the "if you control at least" wizards. But most of the time you'd be better off playing with a snow permanent. (You might even make this snow itself, even that's probably not too strong with the wizards who are quite good, but investing a card specifically to turn them on is a big investment.)

Ah, yes. Then this would function like Liquimetal Coating did for Metalcraft.

Exactly. But there's a lot more cards that interact with artifacts: it seems liquimetal coating + shatter isn't as powerful as it looks at first sight.

Wouldn't this make more sense as a snow artifact?

Yes it would, and it was always meant to be I just miffed. Now it is. Thanks guys.

This is a nice, simple snow-enabler. I like it at common. It definitely helps push the snow theme by not being very powerful on its own, but potentially having a great use.

I don't know how picky you want to be with wording; if the templating doesn't matter, stop reading now. Snow, being a supertype, is only an adjective. The way I would word this would be "Target permanent becomes snow until end of turn." It's like saying it becomes red: you don't say it becomes "a red permanent." I also cut the part about "non-snow" because it doesn't really matter. Snow is a binary condition.