Slag Strider

Affinity has always paid you back on the way in: the mechanic discounts the cast, and once the creature resolves the artifacts have already done their job. This one keeps asking for them afterward. The body arrives cheap enough in a dense artifact board, but the pinging ability converts every leftover Ornithopter, every spent Blood token, every cracked Equipment into a point of reach, one artifact at a time. The seven-mana printed cost is a fiction you almost never pay, while the sacrifice cost is real and recurring, so the card wants a deck that treats its artifacts as ammunition rather than permanent fixtures. It sits in a strange spot between finisher and machine gun: a 3/3 that would be unremarkable if it were not turning an overbuilt artifact count into damage on any target, creatures and players alike. The closest structural cousins are the old artifact-sacrifice engines that ground a wide board into inevitability, but those usually needed a separate outlet; here the outlet is stapled to the payoff. The two halves want the same thing (a board full of cheap artifacts) and spend it twice: once to land the body, once to burn with it. Overbuild the artifact side and the affinity discount and the sacrifice fuel arrive together, which is the only justification for a creature this modest priced this high.