Stitcher's Apprentice
The comma is the whole design. Read the ability as a single thought and it looks like a tax on itself: spend two mana and a tap, make a 2/2 Homunculus, then give a creature away. Read it as a sequence and it becomes a repeatable sacrifice outlet that hands you a body on the front end, so the creature you feed in dies while a fresh 2/2 stays behind. The naive read still works (turn a 1/2 into a 2/2 and pay for the privilege), but that is not where the payoff lives. The payoff is in the gap between "create" and "then sacrifice": you can loop a creature with a leaves-the-battlefield trigger, dispose of something worth more dead than alive, or feed in the token it just spat out. That last option is the structural key. Because the sacrifice happens inside the effect rather than as part of the activation cost, it can never gate the ability: with no other creature in play, you make the token and then sacrifice that very token, and the outlet stays online indefinitely. A single Homunculus is all the engine ever needs to keep tapping. The small frame is part of that machine, not incidental to it: fragile enough that nobody respects it, durable enough to keep grinding, and the activation light enough to fold into a curve without choking it. Stock the deck with things that want to die, and the outlet stays available on demand, no separate enabler required.


