Archfiend of Ifnir

Cycling began as a smoothing tool: a card you didn't need became a card you did, for a small fee. This Demon turns that release valve into a weapon. While it sits on the battlefield, every other card you cycle or discard stacks a -1/-1 counter onto the entire board your opponents control, which reframes discard-as-cost and looting effects (the kind usually treated as pure filtering) as repeatable, asymmetric removal: a sweeper paid for one creature at a time, on your terms, at whatever speed your enabler operates. The toughness reduction is permanent, so counters accumulate across turns rather than resetting at end of step; a slow drip of cycling can grind a wide board to nothing without ever casting a dedicated removal spell, and the same counters clip the attackers and blockers that would otherwise trade with your board or race you back. The 5/4 flier closes games on a clock that doesn't care whether the ground is contested, giving the engine a finisher while the counters do their patient work. What makes the design sing is how little it asks of the deck around it. You keep doing what black-based filtering shells already want to do (loot, rummage, cycle for value) and the table quietly loses its creatures. The trigger reads "another card" for tidiness, but the real governor is structural: the ability only functions while the Demon is on the battlefield, so it can never enable its own arrival. Its power is tied to the discard density you build around it, not to a self-contained loop.