Ebon Praetor
A creature that decays unless you feed it, and the feeding is the whole point. The upkeep -2/-2 counter is a clock running against you: left alone, the 5/5 body shrinks to nothing in three turns. The sacrifice ability is how you wind it back up, removing a counter for a creature each upkeep, with Thrulls paying a premium by also adding a +1/+0 counter. That last clause is the design hook, and it ties this Avatar directly to the engine of its set: Fallen Empires built its black-aligned faction around Thrulls, expendable bodies the deck was already churning out by the handful, and this is the apex predator that eats them. The structure is a closed loop. The Thrull generators spit out fodder, the fodder buys time and growth, and trample plus first strike turn a sustained body into a finisher rather than a chump-blocking dead end. The friction is severe by modern standards: you sacrifice during your upkeep, once per turn, so the upkeep counter and the removal race are tightly synchronized, and you cannot stockpile activations or react at instant speed. It demands a sacrifice economy already running before it is worth casting, the kind of single-rare build-around that early sets used to anchor a whole archetype on rather than spreading the reward across an easy curve.
