Rathi Fiend

The symmetry is the design's whole personality: it drains every player three life on the way in, the engine owner included. That self-inflicted cost is the toll for what comes next, a tutor-to-battlefield chain that fetches the next link in the Mercenary food chain. Because the activation carries no timing restriction, the search can fire on an opponent's end step or in response to a removal spell, slipping a fresh body onto the board before the answer resolves. Nemesis built Mercenaries as a black tribal answer to the white-aligned Rebels, and the cleavage between the two is exactly this: Rebels searched only within their own ranks and tended to play fair, while the Mercenary chain demanded payment in life and asked you to climb downward, grabbing cheaper Mercenaries to set up future fetches. This sits high enough on the curve to anchor that chain, since its activation reaches anything with mana value 3 or less, but it gives back the lever in blood rather than just mana. The reason the entry drain hits all players rather than just opponents is balance friction: a tutor engine attached to a recurring drain would be too clean if it only punished the other side, so the cost is universal and the pilot eats it every time a fresh copy lands. What reads as a clumsy life swing is really the brake on a search ability that, left unchecked, assembles a board with alarming speed.