Grave Robbers

The ability targets an artifact card in a graveyard, not the battlefield, and that distinction is the entire point: this was built to fight artifact recursion and reanimation, not to remove the artifact in front of you. A black mage with a repeatable activation could grind an opponent's discarded or sacrificed artifacts out of the game entirely, exiling each card so it never came back, while the two life padded a total against the aggressive starts artifacts enabled. That life gain is not incidental; it pairs disruption with attrition, so the card does double duty against the exact matchups it was aimed at. The 1/1 body is the price of all that repeatability, and the design accepts it: this was never meant to fight, only to sit back and pick a graveyard clean. It belongs to a design philosophy that has since vanished, where hosers were creatures, color-pie answers were hyper-specific, and a permanent you could activate again and again was the premium way to solve a problem a one-shot spell could not. Sideboard hate lived in the main deck then, and a graveyard was a resource you attacked directly rather than something incidental to the game state. The narrowness is the tell: every line of this card is bent toward a single job that mattered when artifacts defined early Constructed.