Balduvian Dead

A black creature whose only reason to exist is a red activated ability, printed in a set built entirely around the gold-card philosophy of forcing two colors into one slot. The 2/3 body is incidental; the engine is the point, and it runs on a graveyard-as-fuel exchange that was novel for its era. You pay and exile a creature card from your graveyard to manufacture a 3/1 hasty attacker that dissolves at the next end step, a one-shot burst of pressure that converts dead bodies into a single swing. The design discipline holding it together is twofold: the token sacrifices itself, so there is no permanent board accrual to abuse, and every activation strip-mines the graveyard, so the engine eventually starves itself. That self-limiting clock is what keeps a repeatable token-maker honest. The friction is the cost: the red half makes this strictly a two-color card despite wearing a black creature's frame, the kind of build-around Alliances leaned into when allied-color synergy was still a fresh design language rather than an assumed one. The token's haste is load-bearing precisely because the body has no future; without the ability to attack the turn it arrives, the activation would buy nothing but a chump blocker. Read as a whole, it is a graveyard consumption piece dressed as a creature, an early experiment in treating the yard as a resource you spend rather than a place cards merely rest.