Melancholic Poet

Repartee ties this Elf Bard's payoff to a habit spellslinger decks already have: pointing removal and pump at creatures. Every targeted instant or sorcery that hits a creature drains each opponent for one and refunds you the life, which turns the incidental targeting of a spells-matter deck into a slow, unavoidable clock. The design's discipline is in the trigger condition. It rewards spells that target a creature, not any noncreature spell and not the whole board, so a sweeper or a counterspell does nothing here; the drain only fires when you cast something that targets a creature. That narrows the enabler pool to burn, removal, combat tricks, and creature-targeting utility, and it means the poet asks you to keep aiming spells at bodies rather than at hands or permanents. The drain is symmetrical in neither direction: it is pure attrition, a life-swing that pushes reach in a black deck otherwise short on ways to close from a stalled board. A 2/2 for two is a body that trades early and gets outclassed late, so the card is not the threat itself; it is the engine that makes a pile of one-mana creature-targeting spells add up to a game. What it converts is repetition. One trigger is a rounding error, but a deck built to cast several such spells a turn turns each pointer into a small, compounding tax on the opponent's life total.