Acererak the Archlich
The venture mechanic gave Wizards a way to tie a creature's cost to progress through a shared dungeon, and this is the design that leaned on it hardest: a 5/5 body wearing a three-mana price tag, contingent on having already walked all the way to the end of Tomb of Annihilation. Until that dungeon is complete, the card refuses to stay: it bounces itself back to hand and ventures again, effectively selling you a dungeon crawl at the cost of a tempo hit each time you cast it. It is a self-perpetuating engine disguised as a body, and the flavor is exact: the archlich keeps clawing his way back until the ritual is finished. Once Tomb of Annihilation is done, the card resolves for good and the second half takes over: an attack trigger that forces every opponent into a sacrifice-or-give-you-tokens decision, an edict that also builds your board when they refuse to bleed creatures. The two clauses pull the card toward two different jobs, one a value engine that wants to be cast repeatedly and one a recurring board-swing that drains opponents' boards and grinds down control. Acererak is the clearest example of venture being used not as a bonus stapled to a card but as the load-bearing beam of the whole design, with the completed-dungeon check acting as the switch between the two modes.
