Shrewd Negotiation

The whole bet rides on what you give up versus what you take. Most exchange-control effects are built to discourage lopsided trades: you hand over something to receive something, and the rough symmetry is the brake. This one cheats that symmetry by widening the back half of the deal. You surrender an artifact, but you can pull back either an artifact or a creature, which means the artifact you give away can be the cheapest token, the spent husk, the thing you no longer need, while the prize is anything across the table that breathes. That asymmetry is the design hook: it reframes a clunky five-mana sorcery as a one-sided theft contingent only on owning a single artifact worth less than the target. The friction is twofold. You must own an artifact at all, and the swap is permanent rather than a temporary gain-control loop, so the deck has to keep disposable metal on hand to feed it. Run it in a shell that manufactures Servos, Thopters, or Treasure and the cost of the exchange approaches nothing; run it in a deck with one beloved artifact and you are handing your opponent a real card in return for one of theirs. The spell punishes scarcity and rewards artifact abundance, which is exactly where its color and its era pointed it.