Esoteric Duplicator
Most Clue tokens are cardboard placeholders: pay two, sacrifice, draw. This one weaponizes the sacrifice event itself, turning every artifact you crack (including its own body when you draw) into a potential copy engine. The trigger is what makes it more than a fancier Clue: it watches for any artifact leaving via sacrifice, and offers to rebuild it as a token at the next end step for two mana. That framing quietly rewards decks already built to feed sacrifice outlets. A Treasure spent for mana, a Food eaten for life, a combat trick equipment traded away: each one can leave a duplicate behind if you have the mana open and this on the battlefield. The delayed timing (a token at the beginning of the next end step, not immediately) is the discipline here, since it keeps the value one step behind the sacrifice rather than doubling it on the spot, and it means the copy arrives too late to be sacrificed to the same outlet in the same window. Structurally it sits in the lineage of artifacts that convert throwaway permanents into recursion, but it does the work sideways: instead of returning cards from a graveyard, it manufactures fresh copies at the moment of destruction. The card asks you to build a battlefield full of artifacts worth copying, then to keep feeding them into whatever grinder you already have, taxing each duplication by two so the engine never runs entirely free.


