Arcbound Ravager

The engine that turned a pile of artifacts into a single lethal threat. Modular gives the card its insurance policy: counters that migrate on death rather than evaporate, so removal trades down instead of resetting the board. But the sacrifice line is where the design earns its reputation. Every artifact in play becomes potential power, which means a wide artifact board can dump itself onto one attacker at instant speed (pumping a creature mid-combat after blocks, redirecting counters off a dying threat onto a fresh body, or sandbagging the counters somewhere safe to deny an opponent the satisfaction of a removal spell). The body starts at 0/0 and lives only because Modular hands it a counter on the way in; that fragility is the price for an ability with no upper bound. What makes the card structurally dangerous is that it converts board presence into a single point of pressure, sacrificing breadth for a threat that grows faster than most decks can answer. It rewarded the artifact-heavy shells of its era so thoroughly that it became one of the load-bearing pieces those decks were built around, the card that punished any opponent who let the game stretch long enough for the artifacts to accumulate. Two decades on, it still defines what a sacrifice-fueled artifact aggro deck wants from a two-drop: cheap, recursive in the sense that its value survives death, and capable of ending a stalled game in a single combat step.