Faith of the Devoted

The premise here is that a deck shedding cards should be paid for the act, not just the cards. Each cycle or discard becomes a fork in the road: pay one mana to convert a piece of filtering into a four-point life swing, or let the trigger pass when the mana is better spent. The optional payment is what keeps the engine measured. It does nothing on an empty hand and nothing without an outlet feeding it, so it asks for a build organized around throwing cards away rather than around any single card. Stack enough cyclers and discard effects and the one-mana tax becomes a recurring drain each turn, paying out incrementally rather than in one detonation, rewarding density of triggers over the strength of any one. The drain-and-gain shape gives it a reach a life-loss-only version would never have: each opponent loses two while you gain a flat two, so it props up your total while chipping away at everyone else's, and where the payment holds steady the loss compounds across a crowded table even as your own gain stays fixed. This belongs to a family of black designs that treat the hand as fuel and pay you for spending it, the kind of payoff that turns a smoothing keyword into a clock without ever doing the work alone.