Cut of the Profits
Black card draw has always been priced in life, from Night's Whisper to Sign in Blood to the granddaddy of them all, Necropotence. What Casualty does here is add a second currency: sacrifice a creature with power 3 or greater and the spell copies, which means you resolve two independent Xs. The wrinkle is that X is chosen once, on cast, and the copy inherits it, so if you point X at five you draw five and lose five, then the copy draws another five and costs another five life. The creature you feed it is not an afterthought; it is the price that doubles the payout. That makes this a very different animal from a standard draw-two. It rewards decks already generating expendable bodies, tokens, or a creature whose death you wanted anyway, and it punishes greed twice over: the life loss stacks with the copy, so the same X that felt safe on one resolution can be lethal across both. The elegance is that the two costs are unrelated. The life is the color's traditional tax on card advantage; the creature is the toll for scaling that advantage without paying more mana. You pay black's usual price to draw, then pay a body to draw again at no additional life-per-card discount. It is a refill spell for a deck that treats creatures as resources rather than threats.
