Nim Deathmantle
The static bonuses are a smokescreen: nobody equips this for +2/+2 and intimidate. The reason this Equipment exists is the recursion clause, and the wording is doing something quietly devastating. Whenever any of your nontoken creatures dies, you may pay four to return it to the battlefield and attach the Deathmantle to it: the trigger fires off the death itself, not off the equipment, so it arms again every time fodder hits the graveyard whether or not the mantle was on anything. Pair that with a free sacrifice outlet and a creature that makes mana when it enters (Ashnod's Altar plus a nontoken creature that generates enough mana is the canonical loop), and the four-mana tax stops being a tax at all: the engine pays for its own resurrection and loops as long as you have bodies to feed it. That is the design tension the card resolves. Cheap reanimation is normally gated behind sorcery speed, life payment, or a one-shot exile clause; this one is repeatable, triggers when a nontoken creature dies, and re-attaches to the creature it brings back so the chain stays armed. The per loop is the only thing standing between a value engine and an infinite combo, and a single mana source that nets four flips it from one to the other. It also rewrites the returned creature into a black Zombie, which feeds tribal triggers and color-payoffs more than it does the evasion the keyword grants. A combo piece dressed as a stat-stick, and the combo has been the whole point since the day it was printed.


