Hoard-Smelter Dragon

The rare repeatable artifact removal that doubles as a clock. The activated ability does two jobs at once: it pries apart the opponent's mana rocks, equipment, and bombs, and it converts whatever it kills into raw aggression, growing the dragon by the destroyed artifact's mana value until end of turn. The design choice that makes that interesting is the scaling. Against a cheap rock it is a small bump; against a six-mana artifact threat, the same activation strips a problem and turns this into a swing that often ends games on its own. The cost is what keeps the engine honest: at per use, you are spending most of a turn's mana to fire it once, so the ability rewards a board where you have already untapped with mana to spare rather than one where you are casting it on curve. Without any artifacts to target, all that scaling-removal power goes dark and you are left with a 5/5 flyer whose ability simply has nothing to point at, which is the deal you accept for a line that is dead in some matchups and backbreaking in others. The lineage here is the red idea of stapling removal to a finisher, where a creature carries its answers in its activated line instead of leaning on separate spells; this is the version pointed squarely at the artifact axis, and it ages well into any era where artifacts carry real mana value.