The Underworld Cookbook

Discarding a card is usually a cost you swallow, not a resource you convert. This turns it into a repeatable engine on two fronts: the tap ability launders any dead card in hand into a Food token, and the sacrifice mode later cashes the whole artifact in to return a creature card from your graveyard to your hand. That first line is the one that mattered. It gave graveyard-fueled decks a one-mana enabler that fills the yard, generates artifact-count triggers, and produces Food all at once, folding what would normally be three separate deckbuilding slots into a single cheap permanent. The cheapness is the point: at one mana it deploys immediately and starts churning, so the discard cost stops reading as a loss and becomes the input to whatever payoff sits on the other side (madness, delirium, threshold, aristocrat fodder, or plain Food-matters). The return clause is the release valve, an expensive, slow, single-use exit that keeps the engine from being pure free value; you commit the entire artifact to buy back one creature, and it comes back to hand rather than to play, so you still have to pay to recast it. What elevates it past a durdly value piece is throughput: every ability on it points the same direction, at putting cards in the graveyard and then deciding what to do with them, and the friction of discarding is not a tax but the fuel line.