Kuro, Pitlord

Two costs, two currencies, and the design rests on keeping them from ever colliding. Getting a 9/9 into play in the first place is its own project: nine mana, three of it black, is a casting cost that most often gets bypassed by cheating the body onto the battlefield rather than paid honestly. But that's the entry fee. The ongoing toll is what defines it. The four-black upkeep payment gates the body behind a mono-black commitment so deep that splashing it is a fantasy, and it turns each upkeep into an active resource decision rather than a passive one. The second ability earns the rest. It demands no mana at all, just a single life per activation, so once the Pitlord is down you can drain your own life total into a stream of -1/-1 effects, sweeping a board of small creatures or grinding one threat down across a turn. Life becomes the currency you spend on removal, the most distilled expression of what black has always promised. The split is clean: black mana keeps the body alive at the upkeep step, life keeps the gun firing, and the two never compete for the same resource. This belongs to the lineage of black demons that demand an ongoing toll for an outsized effect, where the discipline of paying is the real cost. Miss the upkeep and Kuro simply leaves; feed it and it becomes a slow, painful machine that converts a life total into a board wipe.