Armor Wars

The three-chapter arc reads as a compressed artifact-deck life cycle: mine the board for cards, discount the rebuild, then convert your best piece into a burn spell. The pivot is chapter I, which offers to draw a card per artifact you control but forces symmetry, handing each opponent a fresh card if you cash in. That is a deliberate governor on a color pair that rarely gets to refill so aggressively: Izzet historically pays for card advantage with velocity and risk rather than raw parity, and the shared draw is the price this chapter charges for the biggest hands. Chapter II is the payoff window, a turn where the discount rewards you for having held artifacts back rather than dumping everything into the initial draw. The finale scales off the greatest mana value among your artifacts, which quietly reorients deckbuilding: a pile of cheap tokens fills chapter I but flatlines chapter III, so the reach mode wants at least one genuinely expensive artifact on the board when the Saga sacrifices itself. It only ever hits an opponent, never a creature or planeswalker, so it is a clock rather than an answer. And because the Saga advances as it enters and again after each of your draw steps, chapter III does not land until two full draw steps have passed: you are announcing an artifact payoff two turns in advance and asking the table to let the pieces live long enough to collect on it.