Foreboding Fruit

The classic two-cards-for-two-life template, taxed with a color-intensity clause that turns the payment structure inside out. Card draw at this rate has always cost life, from Sign in Blood forward; what this design adds is a lever. Cast it off a splash and you get exactly the old effect, no more. Commit three black mana and the card refunds the life it just charged you, plus one, through a Food token you can crack later at your leisure. That is the adamant hook working as intended: it rewards a deck that has already made the deeper commitment to black, and pays nothing extra to a deck that hasn't. The Food itself is the quiet part of the design. It doesn't fire on cast, so the life swing is deferred and optional, sitting on the battlefield as an artifact until you need three life or need to feed a sacrifice engine. The gap between "draw two, lose two" and "draw two, net a Food" is the whole strategic axis: a mono-black deck buys card advantage with almost no true life cost, while a two-color deck accepts that its draw spell is a hair worse than the baseline it descends from. A small, disciplined piece of design that uses color intensity to price the same card two different ways depending on who is casting it.