Dread Reaper

A textbook example of Portal's design philosophy: a beginner-facing product that printed big, splashy bodies and balanced them with the bluntest possible drawbacks. A 6/5 flier for six mana would have been a premium finisher even in the contemporary Standard sets, so the cost was paid in a hard, immediate life payment that a new player could grasp without parsing a paragraph of rules text. There is no escape clause, no condition, no way to play around it; the life simply goes the moment the creature arrives. That directness is the whole point. Where later black fatties learned to launder their drawbacks into something exploitable (a sacrifice payoff, a graveyard recursion engine, a payment you could turn into card advantage), this loss is pure tax with no upside attached. The flavor and the math line up cleanly: a Horror that costs you a piece of yourself to summon, sized so a kitchen-table beatdown deck could close a game while still feeling the sting. It belongs to the era when a drawback was meant to be felt rather than gamed, a fossil of how Wizards once taught the idea that creatures-cost-something to players who had only ever read the text on the cards in front of them.