Dross Harvester

Lose four life at the beginning of your end step and the body practically becomes a contract: you have agreed to die unless the board cooperates. The four-life drain on your end step is the bill that pays for an aggressively-statted protection-from-white beater, and the death-trigger turns that bill into a self-balancing meter. Two creatures dying each turn cycle exactly offsets the drain; anything past that and you are gaining life behind a hard-to-kill threat. That math reframes a drawback creature as a payoff for attrition, asking the deck around it to manufacture deaths on a schedule: chump blocks, sacrifice fodder, sweepers you walk away from and your opponent does not. Starved of fodder, the clock is brutal and points straight at its own controller. The protection from white doubles the wager rather than softening it, blanking the white removal of its era and letting the creature swing past white's blockers, which is precisely the matchup where a grinding life-drain threat wants to be unanswerable. So the card sits low on a deck's curve looking like a liability and is actually a bet placed on tempo: your graveyard fills faster than the end step empties your life total, or it doesn't, and there is no middle setting.