Footlight Fiend
The hybrid mana symbol earns this Devil a slot it would otherwise not clear: a body this small, with a death trigger this modest, needs to be castable by any deck that wants the effect, and pricing it at either black or red doubles the pool of decks that can run it. Its job is to convert a creature that has already served its purpose (chumped an attacker, fed a sacrifice outlet, traded down in combat) into a point of reach aimed wherever it is needed: the last damage off an opposing planeswalker, a one-toughness blocker cleared before the alpha strike, the closing ping to the face. The design lives in the aristocrats tradition, where the value is not the creature but the timing of its death, and this one asks nothing of you to trigger: it fires when the body dies for any reason, so the deck's existing sacrifice engines and combat math do the enabling. That inevitability is the appeal. A 1/1 that must be answered eventually, and that pings something on the way out no matter how it dies, is a hard card to profitably remove and an easy one to build around.


