Jagged Poppet

The downside is wired backward from how most punisher creatures work. Damage normally just chips toughness; here it also strips your own hand, one card per point, which means a 3/4 body that hates being blocked, hates being burned, and hates being chump-traded into. The hellbent clause is the payoff that turns the liability inside out: empty your hand, and a connection in combat forces the player you hit to discard cards equal to the damage. The card wants you to be hellbent already, which is the natural state of the empty-handed black-red beatdown decks of its era, and once you are there the self-discard cost evaporates because there is nothing left to lose. It is early hand-disruption philosophy compressed into a single creature: the same discard symmetry that draw-seven effects play with, except the symmetry resolves in your favor only after you have already spent your resources. That sequencing demand is the real constraint. Cast it on a full hand and every point of incidental damage is a punisher trigger pointed at yourself; cast it on an empty one and it is a recurring discard engine that also closes games in combat. The penalty and the payoff sit on opposite triggers, too: you bleed cards whenever the creature takes damage, but you deal them only when it lands combat damage with your hand already gone. Few creatures ask you to be this far ahead on the curve before they reward you.