Purraj of Urborg

A growth engine bolted to a tribal body, built around the idea that a mono-black or near-mono-black deck casts black spells constantly, so the counters should follow. The conditional first strike is the tell about its intended job: it only sharpens while attacking, so the design wants this in the red zone, growing each turn the table plays into black, arriving in combat as a threat that trades up. The tax per trigger keeps the engine honest; the counters are not free, they cost a mana apiece and compete with whatever else you wanted to spend on, so a board full of black spells does not automatically snowball without your active investment. That self-synergy is the wrinkle, too: your own black spells feed it, which means the card rewards a deck already committed to the color rather than one splashing it. As a five-mana 2/3 the rate is plainly of its era, when a legendary creature could be a payoff that asked the deck around it to carry the load rather than a self-contained threat. What it represents is an early stab at the "cast-trigger" payoff that later black designs would refine into prowess-style and magecraft-style engines: a creature that turns your spell count into stats, here gated behind a color requirement and a per-instance toll.