Excalibur II

The scaling here runs off a resource most Equipment ignores entirely: your life total, or rather the events that raise it. It does not care how much life you gain, only that you gained any, so a one-life trickle and a twenty-life swing each deposit exactly one charge counter. That quirk reframes the deckbuilding question from "how much lifegain" to "how many discrete lifegain triggers," which rewards a wide spread of small, frequent gains over a single big payoff. Nothing about the counters is temporary, either: they persist on the artifact whether or not anything is equipped, so the buff bank survives the death of its holder and simply waits for the next equip. Combat math built around it therefore compounds across turns rather than resetting, and an opponent racing a small creature has to account for a body that grows every time you crack a lifegain source. The equip cost is where the design pays its tax: at three mana it is deliberately slow to move between creatures, which keeps a fully charged sword from freely hopping onto whatever needs the swing this turn. What you are building, then, is a lifegain engine feeding one loyal wielder, not a flexible weapon to swing around the board.