Merciless Eternal

Afflict reframed combat math for the attacker: a blocked creature stopped being a wasted attack and started being guaranteed damage, so the defender pays whether they block or not. This Zombie Cleric leans into that pressure with a discard-fueled pump that turns a dead-card hand into board presence. The synergy is sharper than it reads, because the same hand that has nothing useful left to cast becomes fuel for the +2/+2 activation, and a pumped body swinging into a block still triggers afflict for its fixed two. Block it and you lose two; don't block it and you take whatever the swing deals, now potentially a 4/4. The discard cost ties it naturally to graveyard and madness-adjacent strategies, where pitching cards is a feature rather than a tax, and the repeatable nature of the ability means there's no ceiling on how big it gets in a single turn beyond your remaining cards and mana. What balances it is the rate: the pump costs three mana and a card each time, so growing it meaningfully means committing your whole turn to one creature, and the afflict damage stays locked at two regardless of how large the body becomes. It is a grindy, attrition-minded threat rather than an explosive one, built for decks that want to convert flooded resources into incremental life loss and keep applying pressure through the midgame.