Imskir Iron-Eater

The nominal cost of eight mana is a fiction the affinity clause exists to erase: this is a payoff you were always going to cast for a fraction of the sticker price, priced as if the artifact count that discounts it were separate from the artifact count that fuels it. In practice they are the same board. A wide artifact deck pays a trickle to land it, then cashes the same permanents twice more: once on the enter trigger, which converts half your artifacts into cards at the cost of an equal chunk of life, and again on the sacrifice outlet, which turns any artifact into direct damage scaled to its own mana value. That last ability is the one that recontextualizes the whole card. Most artifact aristocrats treat sacrifice as fuel for a drain engine or a token stream; here the artifact's own casting cost becomes a burn number, so a expensive artifact you no longer need is a targeted shock or worse, aimed at a blocker, a planeswalker, or a face. The life loss on entry is the honest tax: a Demon that draws you cards for blood is old red-black currency, and pairing it with a repeatable sacrifice-to-damage engine means the deck's own graveyard-bound artifacts are always worth something on the way out. Nothing here is subtle, but the arithmetic rewards a build where every artifact is counted three times.