Mindstab Thrull

Discard built as a combat trigger is a strange beast, and this card is one of the earliest attempts to price it. The design asks for a real tactical sacrifice: a 2/2 body has to get in unblocked, then you trade the creature itself for the discard, which means the disruption only fires after you have committed to an attack and the defender has declined to block. That two-step structure (attack, then sacrifice) is what keeps three-card discard off a three-mana creature from being absurd; the defender gets a decision point, and the discard never lands without giving up the body that threatened it. It belongs to the Thrull lineage of disposable black creatures, designed to be spent rather than kept, where the value sits in what the sacrifice buys rather than in the stat line. The friction is also the flaw: an opponent who simply chump-blocks turns off the whole proposition, so the card lives or dies on whether you can force damage through. The design splits the difference between a creature and a removal-adjacent discard spell, bolting a heavy effect onto a fragile body and balancing it with a conditional, sacrifice-gated trigger. It reads as a snapshot from a moment before discard-on-a-stick had a settled rate, when the cost of a powerful effect was paid in combat math rather than in a fixed mana premium.