Graveyard Shovel

The crucial detail in this design is who chooses. The targeting clause names a player, and that player exiles a card from their own graveyard, which means the artifact's controller never picks the card that leaves. Against an opponent, this is a tax rather than a sniper: it shrinks a flashback pilot's graveyard by one card a turn and forces them to spend their least valuable target first, since they decide what goes. It cannot reach in and pull a specific recursion piece, the way the controller would want; it can only ask the opponent to bleed off the bottom of their pile. That makes it a slow attrition tool by construction, two mana and a tap for each activation, with no way to clear a yard in one motion the way a wholesale exile effect can. The life-gain rider on creature exiles is incidental, a small cushion that points the artifact toward grinding matchups rather than races, and it pays out only when the targeted player happens to remove a creature. Pointing the ability at your own graveyard is legal and occasionally useful, denying an opponent information or feeding nothing but the two life, but the headline use is the patient grind. It belongs to the early lineage of colorless graveyard answers that chipped rather than swept, with a clock too gentle to matter when the game ends quickly.