Deep Spawn

A 6/6 trampler for eight mana whose design is a study in how to make a fat body feel costly to its owner rather than its opponent. The upkeep clause is the whole point: each turn, you either feed it two cards off the top of your library or let it go, which frames the creature as rent you pay in cards. It is a tax, not a death sentence: the trigger forces a choice, so once the mill grows too dangerous you can simply let it die and sacrifice the creature instead of bleeding your library to nothing. That escape valve is exactly what keeps the rate honest, because it caps the downside without making the threat cheap. The activated ability is the period-correct counterweight to the upkeep pressure. Spending blue grants shroud (untargetable by spells and abilities, including your opponent's removal) but skips the next untap and taps it down, so protecting the creature costs you its attack for a turn. Either you keep it safe or you keep it swinging, never both, and every turn it survives feeds the upkeep. This is the early design grammar of self-mill long before the graveyard was a resource worth filling: here the cards lost are pure downside, a way to price a hard-to-kill threat without simply charging more mana. The Homarid flavor of a creature dragging the deep up with it makes the mechanical bleed read as theme rather than penalty.