Larceny

Discard as a combat trigger is a strange thing to build, because it routes one black strategy through another that doesn't naturally want it: the grinding hand-attack plan welded to the aggressive beatdown plan, with the second made to power the first. Every creature that connects strips a card, so the punishment scales with how well your board is already doing its job. That is the self-undermining loop at the heart of the design. The payoff only arrives when you are winning the combat step, and by the time you are winning combat, an opponent's hand size has stopped mattering. It has always read more as a flavor curiosity than a Spike's weapon: an enchantment that only pays off once your creatures are connecting and rewards you for pressure you would rather convert straight into lethal. The genuinely interesting wrinkle is that the trigger counts each creature independently, so a wide swing can empty a hand in one turn rather than the one-card-per-turn drip that single-attacker pressure implies. That tilts it toward a token or swarm payoff instead of a midrange one, a quiet pointer toward the go-wide aristocrat shells black would grow into later. It remains a rare shape in the color: a discard engine keyed entirely to combat connection, a corner of design space black has mostly left alone in favor of edicts and one-shot hand attack.