Skullclamp

The math is the whole problem. Strap this onto any one-toughness creature and the -1 finishes it off the moment it equips, triggering the death clause for two cards; then re-equip the next token for one mana and do it again. What was meant to read as a fragile buff (a tradeoff between power and survivability) became a draw engine that turns a board of tokens, mana dorks, or any other expendable bodies into a refilling hand at a mana per loop. Wizards saw the consequence fast: it was banned from Standard within a few months of release, an unusually quick correction for the era, and it has been kept off the Modern list and restricted or banned across multiple formats since. The error sits in how the costs were set rather than in any single line of text: the equip cost is too cheap to gate the loop, and the +1/-1 that should have been a downside is the very thing that pulls the trigger. It remains the canonical example of an Equipment whose drawback is load-bearing for the combo rather than against it, and the reason card-advantage engines built around sacrifice and tokens are now priced with one eye on what happened here.