Alpharael, Stonechosen

A payoff dressed as a threat. The attack trigger asks for something most black midrange decks are already doing (killing a creature, sacrificing a token, bouncing your own permanent, or resolving a warped spell), and it converts that incidental board churn into a life-total guillotine: halve the defending player, rounded up, every combat you can meet the condition. Two hits from a 3/3 close a game from twenty, which is a strange thing to say about a five-mana body with no evasion. That is the tension the design leans into. The clock lives entirely in the enabler, so the card is a scorekeeper for a sacrifice or removal engine you built elsewhere, not an engine itself. The random-discard Ward earns its keep quietly: it doesn't blank targeted removal, it taxes it in a currency that hurts the attrition decks most inclined to interact, forcing the opponent to burn a card off the top of their own hand to answer yours. The Void condition reads as flavor bookkeeping until you notice how low the bar sits (any nonland permanent leaving, or any warped spell resolving), which is the difference between a build-around and a card that turns on by accident in a deck that was already trading resources.