The moment your eyes land on Iron Ballista, it feels like you’re looking at the last thing someone sees before their world ends.
The silhouette is unmistakable—an apex weapon of war, looming over the scorched earth like a predator coiled to strike.
There’s no sense of movement. No need. This machine doesn’t charge into battle. It waits—and erases.
Illustration Breakdown
The design is brutal. Iron Ballista sits squat and wide, armored like a fortress but shaped like a claw.
Its front end mimics a vulture’s beak, shadowing the battlefield with silent threat.
The broad treads and plated chassis feel impossibly heavy, locking it into place like a siege weapon that doesn’t need to chase anything—it just watches and fires.
The ground it rests on is cracked and trampled, painted in hues of dry blood and steel dust.
Behind it, the orange-tinted sky burns with that sharp dusk-before-doom glow. Soldiers barely frame the background, tiny and forgettable—already marked for removal.
It’s not a dynamic scene. It’s execution. Cold, deliberate, and impersonal.
The genius here is restraint. No projectile mid-flight. No victim in the crosshairs.
Just the poised tension of death about to be dealt. Then the flavor text cuts in with the perfect punchline:
“There’s no way they can hit us at this dist—AUGH!”
It’s funny. And horrifying. And exactly right.
Gameplay Integration
Iron Ballista enters exhausted—fitting for a weapon this massive. It doesn’t get to act immediately.
But once it’s ready, it fires with eerie precision. Tap to deal 2 to a unit at a battlefield. Simple. Lethal. And timed just like the card’s art: a delay followed by silence, followed by obliteration.
That mechanical pacing matches the visual tone. There’s no chaos, just inevitability.
You don’t play Iron Ballista for tempo—you play it for control. For looming presence.
For inevitability. Your opponent knows it’s coming, and that’s part of the pressure.
Collector Details / Value Mention3
Iron Ballista is card 017/298, part of the standard red Gear lineup in Riftbound.
While its rarity hasn’t been confirmed, it sits on the edge of being a utility staple for any slow or attrition-focused build.
No foil or alternate variant has been revealed yet, but the image’s clarity and presence make it a strong candidate for future showcase treatments—especially one that highlights the metallic textures or the looming silhouette in foiled shadow.
Collectors looking for early signs of sleeper cards should keep an eye on Iron Ballista.
It won’t spike Day 1, but it might become a meta mainstay quietly—and when it does, players will scramble for playsets.
This is red control’s quiet monster. No flash, no drama—just relentless pressure and the calm certainty of impact.
Iron Ballista is how machines say “checkmate.”
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