Commander Greven il-Vec
A 7/5 with evasion for six mana reads like an aggressive curve-topper, until the enters-the-battlefield clause demands a creature in tribute and turns the whole thing into a Faustian bargain. The sacrifice is non-optional and triggers the moment Greven arrives, so the body that arrives is paid for in board presence: cast it into an empty battlefield and Greven himself goes to the bin, a self-defeating loop that forces the deck to hold fodder in reserve before the warlord ever lands. That tension governs everything about the design. Greven is a creature you have to earn twice, once with the mana and once with a body on the altar, and the payoff is a hard-to-block beater that closes games against any board lacking artifact or black defenders. The flavor reinforces the mechanic rather than decorating it: this is Volrath's enforcer, a Phyrexian-grafted soldier whose loyalty was bought with his own body, and the sacrifice spends bodies the same way he was spent. Much later Wizards revisited the name with a commander built around dealing combat damage equal to its own power and pushing it ever higher, a more explicitly synergistic take on the same brutal-general identity. This original printing is blunter and more honest about its cost: it wants to hit hard and does not pretend the sacrifice is a bonus.
