Back when imbuing was new finding relics was a real problem - you needed to either use like high end runic tools to make stuff to unravel, or find loot that was hard to come by.
At the very very beginning you could use a hole in the system to make and imbue stuff, then enhance, then unravel, but they closed that pretty quickly by adding the 20% unravel penalty to imbuing. Oh the glory days though of making a hammer (1 iron ingot), imbuing it 4x up to 80% intensity since it already has the 40%DI (~25 gems,~25 residue accounting for failure or two), enhance it with 1 valorite ingot (I believe 100% success)... and then selling it for 100K+.
With the new artifact loot system though, it is very easy to find things as loot to unravel for relics.
With 2000 luck (1000 from the 10 statue, 1000 felucca) I probably average more than 1 thing that will unravel to a relic per balron I kill. Basically anything titled "artifact" unravels to a relic, and most of the stuff in the tier right below relic status.