Drainpipe Vermin

The trick here is that the body and the ability point in different directions. A 1/1 for a single black mana wants to attack, chump, or feed a sacrifice outlet; the death trigger wants you to throw it away and then spend more mana to make the throwing matter. That second payment is the design hinge: the discard does not come free with the death, it costs an additional black mana on top, which keeps a one-mana common from quietly becoming a repeatable hand-disruption engine. Stitch the same Rat back through a recursion loop, where it can die and return over and over, and the gating cost is the only thing standing between you and an opponent emptying their hand a card at a time, so the tax is doing real work even when it reads like a penalty on your own creature. As a standalone, it is a body that bites a card off an opponent's hand on the way out, the kind of low-stakes attrition mono-black grindy decks have always wanted from their early drops. The Rat tag and the cheap, expendable frame mark it as a piece built for sacrifice and aristocrat shells rather than a card meant to swing games on its own.