Arcum Dagsson

The genius and the curse of this design is the split between a mandatory sacrifice and an optional tutor. The ability targets an artifact creature, not its controller, and forces that controller to sacrifice it; the player may then search for a noncreature artifact and put it onto the battlefield. Read cold, the wording points outward, at an opponent's permanent, as a way to grind down someone else's artifacts. In practice the card aimed at home is the one that builds an engine, because the most efficient artifact creature to sacrifice is your own worthless body: an Ornithopter, a cheap token, anything you would happily feed it. The point is not to deny anyone the replacement (an opponent forced to lose a creature would happily search up a free artifact too); the point is that when you sacrifice your own bodies, you keep that tutor for yourself, converting junk into the best noncreature artifact left in your library, one activation at a time. The tap symbol is the only real brake; an untapper or a way to copy the ability collapses the chain into a single turn. The targeting also defines the reach: an opponent's creature with hexproof or protection from blue sits outside the ability entirely, while the controller's player-level hexproof does nothing, since the creature is the target, not its owner. And a board with no artifact creature simply offers no legal target, which is why the deck built around this artificer supplies its own disposable bodies and digs through itself, tap by tap.