Additionally, I think it is a very flavorful card, as the two life it costs to cast beautifully illustrate the characteristics of the black color in Magic: The Gathering
10 Conversion Apparatus Mana, Energy, Back To Mana This Artifact makes itself useful while you're working on gathering up a pool of mana and Energy counters
Also with the rising popularity of an eternal format that can use Reserved List cards like Commander, having them be reprinted more often would improve the game's most popular format considerably
Vial Smasher the Fierce is at least marginally good in Cube, though
One of its major weaknesses is that spells may only be countered once, and that once is when they're cast, so you've got to have the mana, or you may just end up getting beaten by the one card that you didn't counter if you can't dig for your Sphinx fast enough, (though the Into the Roils do provide a countermeasure to this)
Unlike Kadabra, it's extremely unlikely that either of these cards will ever return to general play