Hellfire Mongrel

The clock that punishes a spent hand. Most aggressive red creatures want their opponent low on life; this one wants them low on cards, turning the natural endgame of a long grind (both players down to their last few resources) into a recurring penalty. Once a player's grip thins to two cards or fewer, every upkeep starts with two damage, which makes this a particularly nasty threat against fellow aggressors who have already emptied their own hands racing to the bottom, and against any deck forced into topdeck mode by a faster opponent. The body is incidental; the design is a tax on hand size wearing a beater's stat line. The wrinkle is the trigger's timing. It checks at the beginning of each opponent's upkeep, before that player draws for the turn, so the card coming off the top arrives too late to lift the count above two and switch the ping off that turn; the threatened player eats the damage first and only then refills. The one way out is to be holding three or more cards when upkeep rolls around, which a player at the bottom of a grind rarely is. It sits in red's lineage of hand-size punishers, the color's contribution to attacking an empty grip: where black drains and white taxes, red simply makes drawing nothing hurt.