Armed Response

The damage scales with a board state most decks never build toward, which is the whole problem this card runs into: it asks a removal spell to be a payoff for an Equipment-matters deck that has to already exist around it. Three mana to deal damage equal to your Equipment count means a single Equipment makes it a worse Shock that only hits attackers, and you need three or four artifacts riding the battlefield before the rate justifies the slot. That is an unusual shape for white removal: not a fixed point of damage you can plan around, but a variable tied to a permanent type you are otherwise investing in for combat, not for burn. The defensive restriction (attackers only, no creatures you could kill on your own turn) further narrows it into a reactive blowout in the late game of an Equipment-heavy build, the kind of deck that wants to suit up a creature and swing rather than hold up an instant. It comes from an era when designers were still testing whether raw Equipment count could anchor a deck, rewarding the pile of swords and axes itself before equip costs and the cards that cared about them tightened into something sharper. The ceiling is real in a board full of weapons; the floor is a dead card in any deck that is not built to feed it.