Forge Armor

The pump scales with what you feed it, which is a strange thing to put on an instant. Most combat tricks of this era priced their bonus into the mana cost up front; this one offloads the math onto the board, taking the mana value of a sacrificed artifact and converting it directly into permanent counters. In an artifact-dense environment that meant the spell read as cheap fuel for a big payoff: crack a five-cost artifact you no longer need, dump five +1/+1 counters on an attacker, and the body keeps the growth long after the combat step ends. The artifact you sacrifice has to be worth more dead than alive, and because the counters are durable rather than temporary, the value lands on a creature that survives instead of evaporating at end of turn like a typical trick. That permanence reframes what you are paying for: spend the same mana on raw burn or a fleeting buff and the effect leaves the board, but here you trade an artifact's stored value for presence that compounds. The five-mana floor plus the sacrifice cost keeps it honest, since you are committing two resources to a single creature that removal can still answer in response. It is a clean expression of an artifact-block design goal: turn the trinkets and dead permanents littering the battlefield into ammunition rather than clutter.