Erg Raiders

A drawback creature from the era when black's aggressive two-drops still had to pay rent. The carrot-and-stick is the whole mechanism: the 2/3 body is overstated for two mana in the early game, priced above the era's vanilla curve, and the end-step ping is the leash that keeps it honest. Sit back and the card punishes you; send it into the red zone and the downside evaporates. The "came under your control this turn" clause is the small mercy that makes the card playable, exempting the turn it lands so you are not punished for casting it on an empty board. What is quietly interesting is the trigger's structure: it fires at the beginning of your end step and asks only whether the creature attacked, not whether it dealt combat damage, so a chump-block or a swing into a Maze of Ith both satisfy it. (Removal mid-combat spares you for a different reason: a creature that is no longer on the battlefield has no end-step trigger to check.) The card asks one question every turn cycle, and the answer is almost always the same, which is the whole point. It set a template black returned to for years in beaters with self-inflicted upkeep costs (Carnophage, Sarcomancy, Vampire Lacerator), each reworking the same trade: better rate than the curve allows, paid for in life when you fail to use it as intended. Erg Raiders is the prototype, and the prototype is built around a backward-looking end-step check rather than an upkeep cost, which is the structural detail later designs mostly abandoned.