Etched Familiar

A four-point life swing that costs nothing beyond letting the body do what a 3/2 does anyway: trade in combat, chump a bigger threat, or feed a sacrifice engine. The death trigger is the entire pitch, and the shape of that trigger matters more than the swing itself. Because the drain fires when the creature dies rather than when it attacks or enters, it turns every unfavorable block into a small consolation and every sacrifice into value, which is exactly the tempo aristocrats decks want out of a curve-filler. The artifact type is the quiet upgrade over a plain black body: it pulls this Fox into decks that count artifacts, recur them, or sacrifice them for their own payoffs, so the same creature can wear two hats without changing a word of text. It belongs to a lineage of cheap creatures whose dying is the point, alongside Blood Artist and its kin, but where those cards trigger on other creatures dying, this one is self-contained: it pays out for its own death, once, and asks nothing else of the board. That makes it a reliable floor rather than an engine, a two-life-either-way piece that keeps a grindy game inching in your favor whether you sacrifice it early or lose it in a late scrum.