Rats of Rath

The activated ability points the wrong direction on purpose: a destruction effect that can only ever target your own artifacts, creatures, and lands, never an opponent's. That inversion is the whole joke and the whole design. It reads like a downside stapled to a small body, but it is really a repeatable self-destruct button with reach across three permanent types, which is a rarer engine than a dedicated creature-only outlet. The distinction from sacrifice matters: this destroys, so an indestructible permanent shrugs it off entirely, and a creature with regeneration can replace the destruction and survive, whereas a true sacrifice outlet would slip past both. It will not feed payoffs that count sacrifice events specifically; it cares about things dying, not about being sacrificed. A repeatable way to blow up your own lands feeds graveyard payoffs and recursion; on artifacts and creatures it turns expendable permanents into fuel for whatever rewards a death trigger. The cost is honest about what you are buying: a single black mana per activation, a body that trades down in combat, and no built-in payoff. Whatever reason the ability exists has to come from the rest of the deck. Tempest leaned hard into this kind of pun-as-mechanic, where the flavor of vermin gnawing through your own stuff drives the rules text rather than the other way around. Sometimes the death-enabler is the entire creature, and the engine has to be supplied around it.