Jaws of Defeat
Most life-drain enchantments read off a static number: a creature enters, an opponent loses one, or two, or a flat toll regardless of what walked in. This one keys off the gap between power and toughness, which turns an ordinarily flavorless stat spread into a payload. Because that gap is an absolute difference, direction doesn't matter: a 4/1 aggressor pays out three, and so does a 1/4 wall, so both the glass-cannon end of the creature pool and the fortress end feed the same clock. What earns nothing is the balanced body, the vanilla 3/3 whose power and toughness cancel to zero. The design rewards a builder for noticing that lopsidedness in either direction is a resource rather than a liability: token-makers stamping out fragile bodies, defensive stacks of high-toughness blockers, and pump effects that widen the differential on the way in all convert their shape into life loss. Because it triggers on any creature entering rather than on attacks or deaths, the drain accrues before combat is even declared: reanimation, blink, and flicker all feed it just as readily as casting from hand, and an opponent's removal arrives a beat too late to catch the trigger already on the stack.
