Steamclaw

Colorless graveyard hate from an era that hated graveyards with restraint, this splits a single job across two cost structures and lets the controller pick which one the moment demands. The repeatable mode taxes three mana per exile: slow, never running dry, the right tool when you need to chip at a yard turn after turn. The sacrifice mode trades the whole artifact for a single one-mana exile, cheaper per use, decisive, and gone afterward. The interesting wrinkle is that the disposable mode costs less than the recurring one, which inverts the usual instinct to spend a permanent freely. The reward goes to patience: leave it untapped as a standing threat while the opponent develops a graveyard, then convert it into surgical removal the instant a flashback card or a recursion target needs to disappear. As hate pieces go, this is policing rather than demolition. It does not strip a graveyard wholesale or shut off recursion at the source the way later artifacts learned to, and exiling a single card per activation at three mana is a real grind against an engine drawing on several fuel sources at once. What it sells instead is flexibility of tempo: a removal-on-a-stick that decides for itself whether to be a slow attrition tax or a single clean strike, and asks the pilot only to read the board well enough to know which.