Odylic Wraith
Two abilities that look welded together but actually run on different switches. Swampwalk is the cheap, color-pure way to guarantee a connection, but it only fires against an opponent already on black mana; that conditionality is what lets the body carry a rider that would be priced higher on an unconditional creature. The discard, though, is not chained to the Swamp clause: it triggers whenever this deals damage to a player, by any route. Hand it evasion from another source, or simply swing into an opponent who chooses not to trade their blocker, and the attrition still lands regardless of whether a Swamp is anywhere in play. That separation is the design's quiet flexibility. Against a black manabase the two combine into a recurring information attack: unblockable damage that strips a card each turn it survives, grinding the hand down rather than just clocking the life total. Against everything else the swampwalk goes dormant, but the 2/2 keeps its teeth as long as it can find a way through, making it a soft pressure piece rather than a dead one. This belongs to the old tradition of landwalk creatures whose evasion is a metagame bet, but the bet here is hedged: pairing the wager with a payoff that survives the wager losing is the wrinkle worth noting. It rewards a deck built to punish a known mana base without collapsing entirely when the read is wrong.
