Crooked Scales

Coin-flip removal is a design Wizards has flirted with for decades, and this artifact lays the gamble out with unusual honesty: pay four mana and tap, then call it in the air. Win the flip and you kill an opposing creature; lose it and the threat boomerangs onto your own board, where you can buy a reroll for or simply let your creature die. The escalating tax is the clever part of the structure. The card does not let you flip indefinitely for free; every loss forces a real decision (concede the creature, or sink another three mana into a process that might fail again), so a string of bad luck can drain your whole turn before it produces a corpse. That self-targeting downside is what keeps a repeatable destroy effect from being oppressive: the variance is built into the cost, not bolted on as a one-time gate. The activation is steep enough that this was never meant to anchor a removal suite so much as reward a deck willing to treat removal as a slot machine. It sits with the dice-and-coin artifacts of the early era, the ones that prize the act of gambling as much as the payoff, the kind of card that asks whether you would rather have a guaranteed answer or the thrill of maybe getting one for nothing more than nerve and a few extra mana.