Synod Centurion
A 4/4 for four generic is a mana below the going colorless rate of its era, and the sacrifice clause is the bill for that discount. The trigger is a state-based contract: the moment you control no other artifacts, the creature dies, which means it cannot even hold a board on its own. Cast it into an empty field and it euthanizes itself before it ever attacks; the body only exists as long as the rest of your artifacts do. That is the clever part of the design, and it cuts the opposite way from most drawbacks. The danger does not live in the casting; it lives in attrition. Every time an opponent picks apart your artifact base with removal, the clause inches closer to firing, so the creature is most fragile exactly when your wider game plan is collapsing. In an artifact-dense shell the line is dead text, a freeroll on an aggressively costed beater. Strip the support away and the same sentence becomes a removal spell your opponent never had to draw. That inversion (the better your deck commits to artifacts, the safer the body) is the signature of the artifact-matters design of its time, which rewarded buying into the theme rather than splashing a single colorless card. Run it over a real artifact base and you paid nothing for the stats. Run it alone and you built a creature that times its own demolition.
