Dissection Tools

The equip cost is the whole trick: sacrificing a creature to move the tool turns an otherwise unremarkable five-mana Equipment into a repeatable sacrifice outlet that always arrives with a body already attached. On entry it manifests dread and bolts itself to whatever falls out, so it never sits inert waiting for a legal target the way most gear does. What lands is a face-down manifest creature wearing +2/+2, deathtouch, and lifelink at once: a blocker that trades up against almost anything and gains life on every point of damage it deals. The design's real hinge is that sacrifice-to-equip clause, which lets you feed the manifested body (and any later fodder) into an aristocrat engine to re-arm each turn. It does not drain life on its own; the lifelink lives on the wearer, so the payoff comes from combat and from whatever death triggers your fodder is fueling, not from the act of eating a creature to reattach. The tax is genuine, both the five up front and the creature spent every reattachment, so this is not efficient by rate; each cycle has to earn back what it consumed. For decks already built around bodies leaving the battlefield, that cost reads as upside. The structural wrinkle worth noticing: sacrifice outlets almost always live on creatures or enchantments, and stapling one to a piece of gear that also generates its own wearer packages the pieces more tidily than their parts suggest.