Rathi Intimidator

Mercenaries were a black-aligned answer to the Rebels, a tutor chain that fetched downward by mana value rather than upward, building from the top of the curve toward the bottom. This sits at the engine's hinge. Tap it, pay , and it drags any Mercenary permanent of mana value 2 or less out of the library and onto the battlefield, then resets for the next pull. The downward direction is the whole design tension: where Rebels recruited bigger threats as the game went long, Mercenaries flooded the board with cheap bodies, and a 2/1 with Fear at the head of that chain meant the chain leader doubled as a clock most decks struggled to block, since Fear walls off everything but black and artifact creatures. That evasion made the engine body a live threat the moment you weren't using it to dig, and that doubling is the real cost: because the ability taps, every turn cycle forces a choice between swinging for two evasive damage and pulling the next body off the chain. The activation isn't free either, demanding both the tap and two mana. The timing is where the engine earns its keep. Once summoning sickness wears off, the ability lives at instant speed: leave mana untapped, fetch a blocker in response to an attack, or pull a body before removal resolves to soften the loss.