Cabal Archon

The drain engine that turned the Onslaught Cleric tribe into an actual win condition rather than a pile of lifegain. Each activation converts one Cleric (any Cleric, including itself in a pinch) plus a black mana into a four-point life swing, and the math compounds fast once you have bodies to feed it: a board of three or four Clerics empties into a lethal burst that no amount of blocking can stop. What makes it a kitchen-table and casual-combo fixture is that it reaches the opponent's life total directly, sidestepping the usual problem with aristocrat-style payoffs that only sacrifice for value. Pair it with a recursive Cleric or any source of token bodies and the loss becomes arbitrary; the drain has no cap beyond mana and fodder. It does ask for a real investment first, since a lone Archon with nothing else to eat can only sacrifice itself for a single four-point swing, but that constraint is precisely what defines the deck it was built for: gather the tribe, then cash it in. Cabal Archon sits at the head of a long line of black sacrifice-to-drain outlets, and it remains one of the cleanest because the rate is fixed and symmetrical (two for them, two for you) with no death-trigger middleman and no upkeep tax. The Cleric requirement is both its leash and its identity: it is a tribal payoff that demands you actually commit to the tribe.