Dagger of the Worthy

Afflict turned the oldest problem in equipment design (a blocker walls the buff and you get nothing) into a guaranteed return, and this is the equipment built to weaponize that math. Strap it on and the defender faces a fork: take two from a creature with +2/+0, or block and bleed a point anyway from the afflict trigger. Either branch advances the clock. The equip cost matched to the cast cost is the quiet structural choice here: the same two mana that buys the artifact buys the move, so the equipment slides between bodies turn after turn without ever feeling like a tax. That portability is the whole pitch. Because it pumps only power and leaves toughness untouched, it is indifferent to whether the carrier survives combat; it wants the cheapest, most expendable attacker on the board, because the value lives in the swing being made, not in the creature living through it. A go-wide deck that floods the board with one-drops gets a recurring engine that punishes both the chump block and the open red zone, and afflict means the blocker's life total erodes whether they engage or not. The equipment is the rare aggressive piece whose strategic axis is reach rather than rate: it does not make a single creature huge so much as make every attack a tax on the defender's life total.