Demon's Horn

One member of a five-card cycle of single-color lifegain artifacts (Kraken's Eye for blue, Wurm's Tooth for green, and so on), each handing you a point of life every time a spell of the relevant color is cast. The premise is sound on paper: a colorless trinket any deck can run as a soft answer to a known color, accruing life as the table does the thing it was always going to do. The wording is more generous than it first reads, too: the trigger is "whenever a player casts a black spell," so your own black spells feed it just as readily as an opponent's, which quietly turns the card from pure hate piece into a passive lifegain engine in a black deck of your own. The trouble is the math. One life per black spell, with no upper bound and no payoff to convert that life into anything, is a trickle that rarely outpaces the damage those black spells are doing in the first place. The accumulation is real but inert: no body to attack with, no card it draws, no spell it stops, just a slow climb that a single burn spell erases. It belongs to an era when sideboard hate could afford to be this quiet, when grinding a few extra points across a long game read as a plan rather than a rounding error. The flavor lands (a demon's magic should cost the room something); the rate never justified the slot.