Jinxed Idol

A hot potato rendered as cardboard, and a rare case of a design idea getting to be the whole card: ownership as a liability. Most artifacts ask what they do for you; this one asks who is holding it when the upkeep trigger resolves. The two damage is not incidental flavor, it is the clock that forces action, and the sacrifice clause is the only release valve, which means the card's entire strategic axis is the timing of when you hand it off versus how much creature investment you can afford to bleed. It punishes a board state with no spare bodies, and rewards a deck built to feed it. The friction is deliberate and symmetrical: whoever ends up stuck with it is taking damage every turn until they find a creature to throw under it, so the artifact becomes a negotiation over which player can least afford the next sacrifice. The card works less as a removal piece or a burn engine than as a pressure device, a way to convert an empty board into a recurring tax. Designs in this lineage are scarce because the math is hard to balance: too cheap to pass off and the loop becomes trivial, too painful and nobody runs it. This one threads it by making the hand-off cost a creature rather than mana, which ties its tempo directly to the state of the battlefield instead of the state of a manabase.