Kothophed, Soul Hoarder
The trigger is the trap. Black has always paid for its card advantage in life, but this reads the whole table's losses indiscriminately: any permanent any opponent loses from the battlefield, every fetchland crack, every chump block, every token that expires at end of turn, draws you a card and costs you a life. A 6/6 flyer for six is already a fine body, but the engine bolted to it has no off switch and no friend-or-foe filter beyond exempting your own permanents. When two or three opponents grind through their boards at once, the life loss outpaces the card draw fast enough to kill its own controller; in heavy creature games it becomes a sacrifice-the-pilot timer. That is the design's honesty: it dangles refueling at a rate nobody else gets, then makes the cost scale with exactly the kind of board state that would justify wanting the cards. The demon-pact flavor (power leased against your own survival) is doing real mechanical work, not just set dressing. Among black engines that convert the symmetry of attrition into raw resource generation, this is the rare one that turns your own competence into a liability: the better you are at grinding an opponent's board to dust, the harder the demon bleeds you for watching.







