If Grip of Phyresis is a particularly blue
interaction with equipment - manipulating an
existing situation to favor yourself - Armory
Automaton feels like a rather red one, despite
not having any colored mana in its cost. You're
basically saying that what your opponents do
during their turn doesn't concern you, and
you're doing everything you can imagine on your
turn. Interestingly, it's actually better
against some of the middle high tier equipment
like Loxodon Warhammer than it is against the
mythic Swords - the latter all refer to "you" as
in their controller, which doesn't change when
affected by the Automaton's ability. In such
equipment-heavy but mythic-light multiplayer
games, you can easily end up eliminating about
one opponent for each attack step, but once
people catch on it'll be a little harder to get
away with that.
Being able to suck up all the shiny equipment is
a useful tool in games with a lot of people, and
this isn't just a one-shot effect. Armory
Automaton grabs whatever it can when it comes
into play or attacks; it means your opponents
will have to spend mana to get the equipment off
of the machine. It's not a great body on its
own, but you're not using this for the unaltered
body; you're using it to get all their
equipment.
Even if you're stalling them for a turn, being
able to throw your nemeses off like this is an
excellent bit of counterplay. I think this is a
worthy consideration in multiplayer-geared
formats, though I don't think it hits enough in
Constructed to get there (Umezawa's Jitte
probably kills it before it can take all of the
things, and Batterskull can just get bounced).
