Balduvian Fallen

The 3/5 body wants to sit back and block; the cumulative upkeep wants to bleed you for the privilege. That tax escalates every turn (one age counter the first upkeep, two the next, three after that), and a single skipped payment ships the whole thing to the graveyard. Most creatures saddled with the mechanic ask only whether the body is worth the drain. This one rewrites the question: only the or you spend clearing the upkeep counts, and each such symbol pumps it +1/+0 until end of turn. Feed black or red into the payment and the wall stands up to swing, growing larger on exactly the turns the upkeep cost peaks. The longer it survives, the more it costs to keep alive, but the more those payments convert into raw power, so a deck that can dump a pile of mana into one turn turns the accumulated tax into a finishing attack rather than grinding the upkeep grudgingly. The generic in the upkeep cost can be paid with anything, but it buys you nothing on the attack: white, blue, or green mana keeps the creature alive without adding a point of power. The red clause is the genuine curiosity here: a mono-black creature that counts toward the boost as readily as . Because appears in the rules text, the card carries a Black/Red color identity despite being mono-black, a relic of an era when this kind of cross-color payment hook showed up more freely.