Nyxathid
The price you pay for a 7/7 at three mana is that someone else gets to decide how big it actually is. The body shrinks by one for every card in a chosen opponent's hand, which inverts the usual logic of beatdown: this thing is most dangerous against a topdecking, hellbent opponent and an embarrassing 0/0-to-2/2 against anyone holding a full grip. That tension is the whole design. It rewards a deck built to empty the opponent's hand first (discard, aggression, a fast clock that forces them to dump cards) and punishes you for casting it into an untapped, card-rich board. And because the penalty is a static ability rather than a one-time stamp, the toughness is alive: it recalculates every time the chosen player's hand size changes, so a player who reloads by drawing crowds their hand and craters the creature, while stripping their hand to the bone (your own discard spell, a Mind Twist effect, their own hellbent attrition) inflates it right back toward a full 7/7. The card asks a sharp question about timing and game state rather than just demanding mana, and that makes it a payoff for a particular attrition plan rather than a generically efficient threat. Where a normal fatty asks "can you afford it," this one asks "have you already done the work," and keeps asking, turn after turn, as the answer changes.


