Covert Technician

Ninjutsu solves a problem artifact cheaters have always had: how to guarantee the trigger connects. Sneak-attack effects flash a body onto the battlefield but leave the swing to chance; this creature slides into an unblocked attacker's place mid-combat, so against an opponent tapped low or holding no blockers, that first hit is essentially a given. What lands with it is the payoff, a scaling cheat that drops an artifact from hand keyed to the damage dealt. The 2/4 body sets the baseline at two mana value for free, which sounds modest until you notice the axis it opens: a two-drop artifact that would otherwise cost mana now arrives during combat, off a card you were bouncing anyway. The whole engine runs on the ninjutsu return: an unblocked attacker goes back to hand to save its mana cost and re-trigger its enter effect, and this creature slots into that loop as a repeatable free artifact drop. The damage cap is the constraint doing the balancing work; the fantasy of dumping a haymaker off one hit is deliberately gated to whatever the 2/4 can push through, so the reward tracks how much you invested in getting it unblocked rather than handing you a windfall. It rewards a deck built around cheap, high-impact artifacts and evasive attackers, and it turns combat sequencing into a resource in its own right.