Pit Spawn

A demon built around the late-90s design philosophy that power came with rent. The upkeep tax is the constraint that makes the rest add up: a 6/4 first striker that deals damage to whatever it blocks or fights, then strips that creature from the game entirely (no graveyard recursion, no dies-trigger payoff). The exile clause is what gives the body its teeth in combat math. First strike means it lands the blow before retaliation, so most creatures that trade into it instead get erased while Pit Spawn survives, turning every combat step into a one-sided removal exchange. The cost of that engine is the upkeep sacrifice, an early example of the upkeep-payment design tradition that ran through black's demons and dragons in this era, where the card threatens to walk off the battlefield unless you keep feeding it. The friction is real: holding back two black mana each turn while landing a triple-black, seven-mana threat asks for a heavily black manabase committed to keeping the thing alive. What it represents is the moment black demons traded the all-downside drawbacks of earlier printings (the random discard and the can-only-block clauses) for a flat tax you could plan around, a more honest contract between a player and a powerful body.