Scroll of Griselbrand

The conditional is the whole gamble: a one-mana artifact whose floor is a single forced discard, with a three-life kicker bolted to a clause most decks will never satisfy. Strip it to its base mode and you have a one-shot disruption piece that costs another mana and the artifact itself to fire, weaker than most discard at the price; without a Demon on board, the second line of text is dead weight. That tension is the design idea: a payoff masquerading as a utility piece, a reward printed for the narrow band of decks committed enough to Demons that the life-loss clause stops being aspirational. Get one online and the activation turns from a marginal hand-strip into a discard stapled to a Lightning Bolt's worth of life loss, the kind of disruption-plus-burn black has always priced steeply when it comes attached to anything this cheap. The friction is that you only get one transaction per copy: the activation sacrifices the artifact, so the discard and the three life happen once and the card is gone. It asks you to assemble the board state that makes it worthwhile, then spends itself the instant you cash in, which means a Demon deck wants several copies rather than one it can lean on. As a tribal incentive it knows exactly what it is doing; outside a Demon shell it is a slow one-card discard spell wearing a famous name.