Covetous Dragon

A 6/5 flier for five mana was an aggressive rate in its era, and the sacrifice clause is the price you pay for it: the dragon insists you keep an artifact on the battlefield or it falls out of the sky. That single line of text functions as a deckbuilding contract. It does not care which artifact, only that one exists, so it rewards the artifact-dense decks that defined its home block. Cheap artifacts, artifact lands, leftover Phyrexian creatures: anything keeps the dragon airborne, and the condition is checked continuously, so a removal spell or an artifact sweeper aimed at your board can drag the dragon down with it. The design logic is a trade Wizards has returned to often: front-load the stats, then attach a condition that only one archetype can comfortably pay. Outside an artifact shell the body is a liability waiting to evaporate; inside one it is a finisher sustained by a single near-free permanent. This is red paying a synergy tax rather than a tempo tax for a body well above its cost, and it remains the cleanest example of how a self-sacrifice clause can gate real power behind one ongoing deckbuilding promise.