Unctus's Retrofitter

The animation clause here comes on a leash, and that leash reshapes everything downstream. The artifact you point at becomes a 4/4 only while this Artificer stays on the battlefield; kill the source and the buff evaporates, so the 4/4 reads less like a permanent upgrade than a leased body. That makes the card a suspended threat rather than a value engine, and it changes how the opponent sequences removal: answering the Artificer answers the animated permanent too, folding two problems into one spell. Because the target is an artifact you already control, the payoff scales with how much inert metal is sitting around: a Treasure, a mana rock, a Signet you have no other use for suddenly swings as a 4/4. Toxic 1 does the quiet stitching, tying the whole package to the poison-and-proliferate axis so a single point of combat damage compounds over turns instead of needing to close a game on its own. A body that clocks that slowly is asking for a proliferate engine downstream to finish the job. What lands is a role-player for a synergy shell: an aggressor that carries its own poison counter and threatens a surprise 4/4 out of a rock, with the standing caveat that the whole animation unravels the moment the Artificer leaves the field.