Caustic Bronco

Dark Confidant's bargain, restructured around a combat trigger and a saddle gate. The unsaddled mode is the honest tax: you reveal and put the top card into your hand on every attack, and the life you pay scales with the revealed card's mana value, exactly the upkeep cost Bob asked for, just relocated to the attack step so it answers to a declared attacker rather than a passive upkeep. That relocation is the whole point. Saddling flips the polarity: the reveal still happens, the card still enters your hand, but the life loss is redirected from you onto each opponent, turning a self-bleeding card-advantage engine into a board-anchored drain that scales with your own deck's curve. The Saddle 3 cost is the structural pressure valve, and it cuts against itself in a way black has to plan around: saddling taps other creatures at sorcery speed, before combat, so the bodies you spend to enable the redirect are bodies you have removed from the attack. You are trading width for the polarity flip. The reveal also resolves only after you have committed: you declare the attack first, the trigger goes on the stack, and you see what you are paying for after the swing is locked in, not before. The Mount frame is doing genuine design work here, splitting one card into two economies (solo advantage engine, drain finisher) without printing two cards, and nudging black toward a token-and-attack shell rather than its usual one-for-one removal posture.