Erebos, God of the Dead

The devotion mechanic asks a hard question of every God: how do you make a five-mana-equivalent indestructible body fair without making it a four-mana 5/7 that just wins? The answer here is the cleanest in the cycle, because the death-god's payoff exists whether or not he's a creature at all. The static lock works the moment he resolves (opponents can't gain life), and the activated engine (, pay 2 life: draw a card) turns life total into a renewable resource long before devotion crosses the line that animates the body. Most of the cycle gives you a passive effect while you wait to flip on the creature; Erebos inverts that priority, treating the 5/7 indestructible as the bonus and the engine as the floor. The lifegain lock is the sharp edge of the design: it doesn't just deny incidental healing, it neutralizes the archetypes that try to race or stabilize against black aggression, and it makes a deck built around paying life for cards far safer than the math suggests. This is the mono-black grindstone the color had been circling for years: a permanent that can't be killed by the removal you actually have, that refuses to leave the board, and that converts the one resource black has always been willing to spend into a steady stream of new threats. The indestructible clause does the heavy lifting on resilience; the devotion gate is what keeps a card this relentless from also being a beater on turn four.