Fleshmad Steed

A 2/2 for two in black is the plainest body the game prints, and the drawback bolted onto this one belongs to a family of cards whose downside reads worse than it plays: the death-trigger tap. The horse lies down whenever any other creature dies, friend or foe, which means it punishes exactly the board state black most wants to grind toward. On an empty board it swings unimpeded; on a crowded one full of trades, chump blocks, and sacrifice fodder, it spends most of its turns tapped out and unable to attack. The design idea is to hand aggro a clean beater while turning the steed into dead weight in attrition, the opposite of where the color usually wants to be. The trigger only taps; it never stops the steed from untapping in your own untap step, so the penalty is purely about timing, not lockdown. One subtlety worth getting right: tapping never costs the steed combat damage it has already committed to. A blocker that has been declared still assigns damage even if something dies and taps it mid-combat, because tapping a declared attacker or blocker does not remove it from combat. The drawback bites only on whether it can be declared in the first place, not on whether it follows through once the swing is on. It is a baseline body with a clock attached, and the clock runs fastest in the decks least equipped to ignore it.