Demonic Lore

Three cards up front, then a bill that comes due at the beginning of your end step. The enters trigger fires once, a Concentrate stapled to a permanent, but the enchantment then lingers as a recurring tax: an end-step check that scales off your entire hand, so it punishes exactly the hoarding its own draw just enabled. Empty your grip before the end step and the life loss shrinks toward nothing; sit on those three fresh cards and it bleeds you six a turn for the privilege of holding them. That reframes hand size from a resource into a liability you have to actively discharge, because the trigger counts your cards at end step and does not care how they got there. It sits in the black tradition of paying life for card flow, with Necropotence and Yawgmoth's Bargain at the extreme end, but where those refill an empty grip on demand, this one wants the grip stripped bare after a single burst. The tension is entirely self-inflicted, which is why discard outlets, cheap spells, and anything that dumps cards fast pair so naturally with it: the surest way to make the downside vanish is to stop having a hand at all.