Cruel Bargain

The black analog to the "draw cards, pay life" lineage, built before the design team had decided how steep that exchange should be. Where Yawgmoth's Bargain charges a life per card and lets you stop, this one fixes the cost at half your life rounded up and demands the full draw of four, no metering allowed. That rounding-up clause is the whole tension: from twenty it costs ten, but the cost stays close to half of everything, so the spell gets cheaper in absolute life as you take damage and proportionally more dangerous the lower you fall. It rewards casting at high life, which is exactly when you least need to refill, and punishes the desperation play it superficially resembles. Originating in a starter-set product aimed at new players, it was deliberately blunt: no instant-speed trick, no scaling, just a sorcery that hands you a fistful of cards and bills you half of everything you have. Pricing the cost as a percentage rather than a flat number is a cleaner expression of black's life-as-resource philosophy than the per-card pricing that came to dominate later. This is a one-shot refuel that asks you to have already built a life cushion worth spending, not the engine you lean on turn after turn.