Plaguecrafter

The edict on a stick that closes the escape hatch. Diabolic Edict and its kin hand the "of their choice" clause to the player you are trying to punish, which is exactly the wrong person to be making the decision; a token deck laughs it off by feeding a spare body, and a defender keeps whatever matters most. This design accepts that clause and then adds a second line for the empty board: a player with no creature or planeswalker still pays, just in cards instead of bodies. That closing line is why the card earns its slot. Against a board with nothing to give, the sacrifice half whiffs but the discard picks up the slack, and you still get a 3/2 out of the deal; against a creature board it forces a choice they would rather not make. The symmetry reads worse than it plays. The 3/2 is yours to spend, so the trick is having fodder ready when it lands: feed it a token, a creature already on death's door, or the spare body a sacrifice theme leaves lying around, and your half of the tax costs you nothing you were not prepared to lose. In the worst case it simply eats itself, sacrificing to its own trigger while the opponent still bleeds. Plenty of black creatures staple a subtraction effect to a fragile shell; this is the one built specifically to never come up empty.