Costly Plunder

The trick to a sacrifice-payoff like this is that it does two jobs at once: it cashes in a permanent that has already given you its value, and it does so at instant speed, which is where the line between filler and engine piece actually falls. A token that just blocked, an artifact whose effect already resolved, a creature with a death trigger you wanted to bank anyway: all of them become two cards held until your opponent's end step or in response to spot removal. That instant-speed clause is doing the heavy lifting. The sacrifice cost reads like a tax, but in a deck built to produce expendable bodies it is closer to free, which is the whole reason this kind of card lives in aristocrats and token shells rather than fair midrange. The lineage runs back through the long line of black "pay a life or pay a body, draw cards" effects, and Costly Plunder sits at the cleaner end of it: no life loss, no creature-only restriction (artifacts count too), just a flat two cards for a permanent you were happy to spend. The body it asks you to feed it is the only real constraint, and for the decks that already treat their creatures as fuel, that constraint costs nothing.