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Moxonomy

Bloodline Recollector // Ancestral Craving

Creature — Vampire Warlock // Instant1 generic manaBlack manaBlack mana

The prepared keyword is a slow-burn twist on flashback's economy: instead of paying an exile cost after the spell resolves, the spell lives dormant on a creature until a condition unlocks it, and casting it flips the switch back off. What sets this one apart is that the trigger is entirely death-bound: three creatures have to die in a single turn before the end step arms it. That is not a threshold you clear by accident. It asks for a board that trades aggressively, a chump-blocking stall, or an aristocrats shell feeding a sacrifice engine, which means the 2/2 body doubles as a payoff sitting inside exactly the kind of deck that generates a graveyard's worth of corpses. The reward for meeting that bar is Ancestral Craving, a draw-three whose three life loss hits the same player who draws, so aiming it at an opponent trades the card advantage for a partial burn spell against a low life total. The design tension is that the creature is the delivery vehicle and the fuel: it survives the carnage it needs, then converts that carnage into cards, and can rearm on later turns if the deaths keep coming. It is a repeatable Read the Bones with the ceiling of a finisher, gated behind a body count only a certain kind of deck reliably supplies.

Oracle Text

Rules text

At the beginning of each end step, if three or more creatures died this turn, this creature becomes prepared. (While it's prepared, you may cast a copy of its spell. Doing so unprepares it.) // Target player draws three cards and loses 3 life.
Legalities

Format Status

Standard
N/A
Pioneer
N/A
Modern
N/A
Legacy
N/A
Vintage
N/A
Commander
N/A
Pauper
N/A
Brawl
N/A
Historic
N/A
Alchemy
N/A
Timeless
N/A
Standard Brawl
N/A
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