Orcus, Prince of Undeath
The X sits ahead of the color pips, so the number you commit scales the whole play before you ever meet the two-black-red core, and that same variable then governs both halves of an enters-the-battlefield choice. Take the first mode and the trigger hands you a wrath you pay for out of your own life total: a -X/-X that shrinks every other creature (the 5/3 flier itself stands outside the symmetry) while draining X from you, so the board you clear leaves you on a clock of your own making. Take the second and the same X funds mass reanimation, returning up to X creature cards whose combined mana value is X or less, each arriving with haste to attack the turn it lands. That coupling is the elegant part: one number sizes the sweep and, on the other line, caps how much graveyard you can drag back, so whichever half fires, X is doing equal weight of work toward opposite ends. Being a choose-one trigger, it commits to answering the board or rebuilding it in a single arrival, never both, and the pilot reads the game to decide which. It belongs to the long line of Demons that charge a toll for their power, and here the toll is literal: the sweeper half taxes you in life, scaled by the same X that decides how much the board loses. The trampling flier out front is the through-line, a body that carries whichever choice you made toward a finishing swing.
