Liliana's Steward

Discard is a race against timing: strip a card from an empty hand and you have spent a card to do nothing. This one-mana Zombie sidesteps that by storing the disruption on the battlefield instead of spending it up front. You play it early, let it block or chump while you develop, and cash in the tap-and-sacrifice for the discard only when your opponent is holding something worth taking. The sorcery-speed restriction is what the flexibility costs: it cannot ambush a reactive spell mid-combat or empty a hand at the end step, so the value is deliberate rather than opportunistic. What you buy in exchange is a hand-attack effect that waits until you choose the moment, a fundamentally different tempo profile from a Duress or a Thoughtseize that resolves once and is gone. The design is an old black idea (trade a creature for hand disruption) rebuilt so the disruption fires on your timeline rather than immediately upon casting. That patience explains the 1/2 body: it is statted to survive as a blocker long enough to be relevant, not to attack, because a creature that dies in the meantime never gets to sacrifice itself. The catch is the same as the appeal: the card that dies to a removal spell or a combat trade takes its stored discard with it, and the deliberate value evaporates before it is ever spent.