Nihilistic Glee

Hellbent is the rare mechanic that pays you for the thing every Magic instinct fights against: running yourself out of cards. This enchantment resolves that tension by being a two-stage engine that bends toward empty-handedness instead of guarding against it. The first ability is a discard outlet that converts dead cards into a slow Spirit Link in reverse, draining an opponent one point while gaining you one each activation. That outlet is doing double duty: it grinds the opponent down, but it is also the mechanism that empties your own hand toward the threshold the card actually wants. Once you have nothing left, the hellbent ability switches on and turns the same enchantment into a repeatable card-drawing engine, refilling at the cost of one mana and two life per card. The design is a closed loop with a built-in tension: the drain outlet feeds you life and pushes you toward empty, then the draw ability spends that life back to refill, and the cycle resets every time you bottom out your hand. The friction is that the life you bank on one end gets paid right back on the other, so the engine wants a deck willing to treat its life total as a renewable budget. It sits in the same black tradition as the draw-for-life designs that came before, but the hellbent gate is the wrinkle: the card refuses to draw until you have fully committed to the empty-handed posture it is built around.