Akul the Unrepentant

The engine here is a Rakdos reanimator's dream rewritten as a beatdown finisher: a 5/5 flyer with trample that also happens to convert a wide board into free cheats onto the battlefield. The sacrifice-three clause is the whole balancing act. It demands a genuine token producer or aristocrats shell to feed it, and the once-per-turn sorcery-speed limit means you cannot chain it into a combo turn or use it as a surprise blocker-dodge. What you get in exchange is a permanent-friendly Sneak Attack that leaves the fetched creature on the battlefield rather than exiling it at end of turn, and asks no additional mana beyond the bodies you were already going to sacrifice. That distinction matters: this is a repeatable, mana-free reanimation-adjacent engine that turns fodder into your biggest hand card, so the deckbuilding tension is between cards cheap enough to sacrifice profitably and cards expensive enough to make the cheat worth it. The flying-and-trample body keeps it from being a pure engine card sitting behind a wall; it pressures life totals on its own while the activation quietly assembles a second threat. Black-red has circled sacrifice-into-payoff designs for years, but most of them either sacrifice for value (draw, drain) or for ramp; this one sacrifices for tempo, spending creatures to skip the mana cost of your fattest creatures entirely.