Vanquisher's Axe

Three mana of total investment for a flat +2/+0 is the deal every generic equipment cutting straight to raw power has to strike, and this one strikes it without a single rider. No evasion, no keyword grant, no card advantage on connect: just the cheapest possible artifact frame wrapped around a damage bump. The design logic is legibility. When an equipment does exactly one thing and asks little to do it, it belongs to aggressive decks that want to keep casting spells and swinging, where the one-mana cast and two-mana equip fit around a curve rather than replacing it. The tradeoff shows up when the equipped creature dies: the axe survives, but re-equipping costs another two mana at sorcery speed, so the power stays put while your tempo does not. That is the honest ceiling of a pure buff stick. It rewards a board that is already committed to attacking and punishes decks that treat equipment as a value engine. What it exists to do is make a small beatdown deck hit two points harder without diluting its spell count, and nothing more ambitious than that.