Scrap

Cycling solved the oldest problem with dedicated artifact removal: the dead card. Before this design, naming an artifact in your spell suite meant accepting that against half your opponents the slot did nothing, a blank you drew and sighed at. Bolting a cycling cost onto a hard answer rewrites that math. The floor is no longer "useless"; it is "draw a card for two mana," which means the maindeck cost of carrying the answer drops close to zero. You run it without flinching, because the matchups where artifacts are absent simply convert the card into card flow instead of a wasted draw. That was a genuinely new lever in the early years of the keyword: cycling turned narrow hate from a liability into something a maindeck could justify. The destroy effect itself is plain: instant-speed, restricted only by needing an artifact target, which is exactly the point. The interesting part is not the kill; it is the escape hatch. Every flexible-by-default removal spell that followed this template owes something to the realization that a discard-for-a-card clause costs the designer almost nothing and buys the player permission to maindeck answers they would otherwise leave on the bench.