Mold Demon

Seven mana buys a 6/6, and then the bill comes due a second time: the enter-the-battlefield clause forces a choice between keeping the creature and giving up two of the Swamps that just helped cast it. That double toll is the whole story. This is black finisher design from an era when Wizards taxed power through entry costs rather than mana value alone, and the Swamp-sacrifice clause is one of the harsher examples on offer. The body is the carrot; the trigger is the stick, and paying it leaves you tempo-negative against any opponent who untaps with their own board intact. The all-or-nothing structure (lose the creature, or lose the lands) echoes the design logic behind Lord of the Pit, where an oversized body comes chained to a recurring price; the difference is that here the toll is paid once, on arrival, in your own lands rather than across upkeeps. The card reads as dated less for its rate than for the assumption underneath it: modern black creatures of this size carry evasion, recursion, or an enter-the-battlefield payoff that justifies the cost. Here the body is the only reward and the trigger is pure tax, not value. It encapsulates how early black demons were costed: large, conditional, and asking the player to bleed for the privilege.