Demonic Taskmaster

A 4/3 flyer for three mana reads like a bargain until you meet the rent: at the beginning of each of your upkeeps, it forces you to sacrifice one of your other creatures. This is the demon-with-a-downside template that black has leaned on since its earliest days, where the body comes undercosted precisely because the recurring cost is meant to bleed you dry. The upkeep tax sorts the card into one of two homes. Drop it into a flat midrange shell and it cannibalizes your own board, eating something useful every turn, and because the clause specifies a creature other than the Taskmaster, you cannot feed it to itself to stop the bleeding; if it is the last thing standing, the whole army in front of it is what gets consumed on the way there. Build around the sacrifice instead and the penalty becomes an engine: a guaranteed death trigger every turn for aristocrats payoffs, a way to cash in persist and undying creatures or tokens you wanted dead anyway, a reliable feeder for anything that cares about creatures dying. The empty-board case is the one genuine reprieve: with no other creature to offer, the trigger simply has nothing to sacrifice and skips. Everywhere else the math is fixed. The rate is the lure, the upkeep is the price, and whether that price is ruinous or productive depends entirely on whether you brought a sacrifice plan to the table.