Sharding Sphinx

A Thopter engine that only ignites when the board is already mostly metal. The trigger keys off any artifact creature you control connecting in combat, not just the Sphinx itself, so the payoff scales with how many of your attackers read "Artifact Creature." Each Thopter token is itself an artifact creature with flying, which means the next combat step has more potential attackers than the last: a board of evasive artifacts feeds itself, and a single unblocked turn can snowball into a small air force. That self-replicating loop is the whole reason to run the card over a flat token-on-attack body. The catch is the entry fee and the precondition. Six mana for a 4/4 flier is a steep rate on its own, and the card does nothing toward its own engine unless you have already committed to a critical mass of artifact creatures to swing alongside it. Note the shape of the trigger, too: each artifact creature that connects nets one Thopter, regardless of how hard it hits, so wide beats tall here. This is a build-around payoff dressed as a fatty: the body lets it close on its own in a pinch, but the design clearly wants a wide, cheap artifact-creature shell underneath it doing the connecting while the Sphinx converts every separate hit into a fresh flier. It pays off a Thopter swarm that was already assembled and offers almost nothing to a deck that was not.