Chainer's Torment

The Saga frame is doing flavor work as much as mechanical work: three chapters that march through Chainer's slow corruption, with the payoff turning your own life total into the monster you then have to fight. Chapters I and II are a two-turn drain that pressures the opponent while topping you off, but the final chapter inverts everything. The Nightmare Horror token arrives sized to half your life total and deals that same number back to you, so the bigger your cushion, the bigger the body and the deeper the wound. A player at twenty makes a 10/10 and drops to ten; a player who has already spent life recklessly makes something smaller but survives more comfortably. That self-damage is the constraint paying for a token this cheap: it forces a read on your own life total as a resource you are spending rather than protecting. The token is a permanent creature, so it outlives the Saga that spawned it, and that permanence is the point. The enchantment sacrifices itself after the third chapter; the monster it births stays on the battlefield as a real threat. What makes the design cohere is that the early chapters and the final one push in the same direction: drain the opponent, stay healthy, then convert that health into a finisher. The math and the story are saying the same thing.