Herald of Hadar

A 4/4 body that presses the board immediately, then settles into black's oldest job: bleeding a room out two life at a time. The activation costs six mana and only ever guarantees that two-point tax, applied to every opponent rather than a single target; the d20 governs the upside, not the floor. Nearly half the range (rolls of 1 through 9) does nothing but tick the table down without paying you back, so the die is a texture layer on top of a reliable drain, not the drain itself. This puts the card in the lineage of black's slow-grind life-loss engines, the Corrupt and Sanguine Bond family, but reframed as variance: rather than scaling with a resource you accumulate, the payoff scales with luck, and only a natural 20 hands over the real jackpot in the form of two Treasure. That ceiling is deliberately marginal, a 5% roll producing tokens the card mostly does not need, the kind of tail that gives a repeatable ability flavor without letting the average activation swing a game. What carries the card is the tax, not the flourish: a mana sink that converts flooded turns into inevitability, on a body big enough to demand an answer before the drain ever comes online. Black has always been willing to pay life and mana to grind a table down one increment at a time, and this is that patience packaged as a creature you can leave standing.