Ashnod the Uncaring
Most sacrifice payoffs care about the body dying: an aristocrat trigger, a life drain, a scry off a Blood token. This one ignores the corpse entirely and cares about the engine it fed. The trigger keys on the act of activation, specifically an artifact or creature ability whose cost included sacrificing one or more permanents, and hands you a copy of that ability with fresh targets. That is a strangely narrow window described in strangely broad terms. Within the artifact-or-creature restriction, the language stays deliberately open: any qualifying activated ability counts as long as sacrifice was part of the price and it isn't a mana ability, which turns modular fling effects, sacrifice-to-draw rocks, and creature-sac removal into two-for-one spells the moment they resolve once. The mana-ability exclusion (spelled out in reminder text) is the fence that keeps it from doubling every Ashnod's Altar activation into a runaway loop on its own, though it does nothing to stop the parade of altar-adjacent engines that don't tap for mana. The 1/4 deathtouch body is doing defensive work, not offensive: this is a creature meant to survive on a board full of sacrifice fodder and keep the copy trigger online while the rest of the deck feeds it. What makes the design sing is that it names no mechanic and no keyword beyond that sacrifice clause, so within its artifact-or-creature lane it retroactively rewards a decade of sac-outlet printings that were never designed with a copy engine in mind.
