  The entanglement resource required for quantum information processing comes
in a variety of forms, from Bell states to multipartite GHZ states or cluster
states. Purifying these resources after their imperfect generation is an
indispensable step towards using them in quantum architectures. While this
challenge, both in the case of Bell pairs and more general multipartite
entangled states, is mostly overcome in the presence of perfect local quantum
hardware with unconstrained qubit register sizes, devising optimal purification
strategies for finite-size realistic noisy hardware has remained elusive. Here
we depart from the typical purification paradigm for multipartite states
explored in the last twenty years. We present cases where the hardware
limitations are taken into account, and surprisingly find that smaller
`sacrificial' states, like Bell pairs, can be more useful in the purification
of multipartite states than additional copies of these same states. This
drastically simplifies the requirements and presents a fundamentally new
pathway to leverage near term networked quantum hardware.
