Highway Robber

Four life swung from one column to the other, attached to a body that stays on the board afterward. Drain on entry was already a worn black template by the time this design appeared, but most of those effects lived on instants and sorceries: cast, resolve, gone to the graveyard. Stapling the swing to a permanent changes what the effect is. A drain spell does its work once; a drain creature becomes a magnet for every blink, reanimation, and copy effect in the format, and the two-for-two fires again on each re-entry. That repeatability is the design's reason for existing. The 2/2 frame is forgettable on its own, deliberately so, because the value is meant to compound rather than arrive all at once: flicker it, return it, clone it, and a modest swing turns into an incremental clock that also tops up your own cushion against aggression. The brake on all of this is built into the trigger itself. The drain only happens when the creature enters, so the upside is gated behind the work of getting it back onto the battlefield. Leave it alone and you have a slow attacker with a small bonus tacked on. Pair it with recursion and the life total leaks in two directions every loop, the kind of grinding attrition black has always been built to win with.