Hymn of the Faller

Black card draw has always paid in life, and the two-mana slot is where the genre lives: Sign in Blood splits the cost across two draws, Night's Whisper trades two life for two cards flat, Read the Bones bundles a scry. What separates this one is where the second card comes from. The baseline transaction (surveil to sculpt what you draw into, then draw and pay a single life) already improves on a plain draw-a-card at the price black usually charges. The Void clause is the deck-building tax: it fires only when the turn has already produced a casualty, either a nonland permanent departing or a spell being warped. That condition has teeth. It refuses to reward a control shell that just wants raw cards; it rewards a board that is already trading pieces, sacrificing, or warping spells, and it checks for those events on resolution rather than at cast. The surveil-first ordering matters too: you know whether the second draw is live before you decide what to bin, so the smoothing is never wasted motion. Slotted into an attrition engine that is constantly churning permanents, it reads as roughly a card per mana with an extra life of tax. Cast on a quiet turn, it is a slightly worse Sign in Blood. The card is honest about which deck it was written for.