Sickleslicer

Equipment carried an old flaw before this design: cast it with an empty board and you held a do-nothing artifact, a sword waiting for a hand to wield it. The keyword stapled here solves that by manufacturing its own bearer, a 0/0 Germ that exists only because the gear is attached to it. Strip the equipment away and the token's toughness collapses to zero and it dies, which means the +2/+2 is not arbitrary stats: that buff is the only thing keeping the carrier alive, so the static bonus is load-bearing in the most literal sense. That coupling is the clever part. The equip cost stays high precisely because casting the artifact already handed you a body for free, so the four mana to relocate it later is the tax for squeezing two creatures out of one card across a game. As an expression of the mechanic, this is the plainest one going: no evasion, no trample, no second ability, just raw numbers bolted to a self-attaching frame. It is the control sample against which the splashier living-weapon designs get measured, the version that shows what the keyword does before any rider muddies the reading.