Phyrexian Tribute

Sacrificing two creatures to destroy one artifact is a math problem that only balances if the artifact in question was warping the whole table. That is the assumption baked into the additional cost: mid-90s design read broken artifacts as threats worth gutting your own board to answer, and priced this spell accordingly. The destroy clause is plain; the two-creature tax is the entire design. Black has always paid a steep toll to reach outside its color pie for artifact removal, in life or cards or bodies, and few tolls printed since have asked for as much as two creatures on top of three mana and the card itself. The result reads as punitive rather than balanced: a sorcery-speed answer that wants you to already be on the losing end of the artifact war before you cast it, since otherwise you are trading two creatures and a card for one artifact. Later black artifact answers asked for a single sacrifice or a chunk of life and felt expensive even then; this one stacks the costs higher and narrower. What survives is a snapshot of how color-pie-bending removal used to be sized, back when destroying the right artifact could feel worth the wreckage of your own side of the board, and the rate made sense only against the specific format-defining artifacts the card was drawn up to kill.