Abyssal Horror

Six mana for a 2/2 flier and a two-card discard is a rate no era of Constructed has ever wanted, but the design captures exactly what black hand disruption looked like before the cost curve got cheap. Stapling the discard to a body solves the problem older black discard had: a sorcery like Mind Rot does nothing once it resolves, while this leaves a flier on the table to keep grinding. The cost of that fix is paying full freight twice, once for the disruption and once for the evasion, all packed into a single point on the curve where a control deck has long since stopped wanting to fall this far behind on tempo. It marks the midpoint of black's long search for disruption that does more than disrupt: the modern answer is to make the discard cheaper and the body smaller, or to make the body a real threat with the discard riding along as a bonus. This printing splits the difference and commits to neither, a transitional sketch rather than a finished template. The Horror is best understood as a snapshot of an era when six mana for a flier plus a Mind Rot's worth of hand attrition was a trade a deck might reasonably be asked to make.