Peer into the Abyss

The whole card is a percentage. "Round up each time" applies to both halves independently, and it works against you on the life side: at an odd life total the loss rounds up, so you bleed a hair more, not less. This belongs to black's long tradition of buying cards with life, but where the older deals traded fixed increments (a card for a couple of life, a fixed handful for a fixed toll), this one scales each half to what it targets, drawing off the library while the loss tracks the life total. That is the symmetry hiding inside a card that reads like a windfall: each half is a proportion of what you already have. The value peaks against a full deck, where half the library is a game-ending flood and your life total is high enough to survive being halved; a thin library both hands you fewer cards and does nothing to soften the toll, which is the natural governor on when you want to cast it at all. Seven mana and triple-black pips fix it as a finisher, not a midgame refill: by the time the mana is there, the wall of cards is meant to convert into a win before the next turn, feeding a board already assembled. Aimed at an opponent it becomes the rarer, meaner line: not a kill, but a way to strand them under a bloated hand while shaving their life, betting you punish both faster than they can spend what you gave them.