Grim Strider

The bargain here is explicit: empty your hand and you get a 6/6 for four mana; hold cards and the body shrivels toward nothing. That inversion of the usual card-advantage instinct is the whole point. Most decks are taught to keep options open, to sandbag a removal spell or a counter, but this Horror reads your grip as a stat penalty and punishes exactly that hoarding. It is a hellbent-style payoff rendered as a creature rather than a keyword: the closer you are to topdeck mode, the larger it swings, which makes it a natural fit for discard-fueled and madness-leaning shells where dumping the hand is already the plan. The friction worth noting is the variance. Drop it on an empty hand and it lands as one of the bigger four-drops black has offered; draw a couple of cards the following turn and it deflates mid-combat, sometimes to the point of dying to its own arithmetic if you topdeck into a flooded grip. That swinginess keeps it honest, because the math updates continuously: timing your empty-handed attacks around when you can afford to refill becomes the real puzzle, and a deck that wants to durdle and stockpile answers finds the creature working directly against it. It is a clean expression of the idea that an empty hand can be an asset rather than a liability, with a stat line that scores your discipline in real time.