Cyberman Patrol

Afflict is a keyword built to punish the defender for doing what defense demands: the moment your attacker gets blocked, they bleed. On a lone creature it is a modest tax. Spread across a board of artifact creatures, it becomes a blocking dilemma with no clean answer. Every chump block that saves a life total costs three of it, so the defender is choosing which way to lose rather than whether to. That reversal is the design point of this small anthem: it does not make your artifacts hit harder in combat, it makes blocking expensive, and it turns a wide, cheap board into a swarm the opponent cannot profitably wall up. The 2/2 body for two mana keeps it in the fight and adds one more afflict source to the pile it enables, but the value lives in the numbers it prints onto everything else you control. Aggressive artifact strategies rarely want their creatures blocked; this rewrites that math so a block is nearly as bad as a hit, and a full stall becomes a slow drain. The catch is scope: the granted keyword only touches artifact creatures, so it rewards a metallic board rather than raw creature count, and does nothing to widen the flesh-and-blood attackers standing beside it.