Chainer, Dementia Master

Reanimation usually pays its life cost once, up front: Reanimate, Animate Dead, Exhume put a body on the battlefield and step out of the way. Chainer turns that transaction into a repeatable engine. Three black mana and three life, every turn you can afford it, pulls a creature from any graveyard and stitches it to the board as a black Nightmare. The Nightmare tag is not decoration: it folds each reanimated target into the anthem and, more importantly, into the leaves-the-battlefield clause that defines the whole card. Lose Chainer and the army he assembled vanishes with him, exiled rather than dying, which means the deck's payoff and its single point of failure are the same permanent. That is the tension the design hangs on. You build a board that scales with how much life you are willing to burn, then protect a 3/3 that, if it falls, takes the proceeds out of the game entirely. The life payment doubles as a feeding mechanism in a shell built around it, since Chainer's own price can fuel another card's cost or trigger. He sits at the center of the Torment madness-and-graveyard theme as a black recursion piece that asks for upkeep rather than a one-time bargain, and the punishment for greed is written directly into how he leaves play.