Ravenous Vampire

An upkeep tax dressed as a growth engine. The body arrives at five mana with flying and a recurring decision attached: feed it a nonartifact creature each turn to add a +1/+1 counter, or skip the meal and watch it tap, which pulls a flying attacker out of both attack and block for the round. That tap-as-penalty clause is the structural valve that keeps the counter accumulation honest. There is no free ride; each point of growth costs a body, so the card scales only as fast as you are willing to cannibalize your side of the table, and the moment you stop sacrificing it goes inert. The friction lands hardest when fodder is scarce, where the choice between tapping and feeding genuinely hurts, and loosens once you have bodies to spare, an inversion of how most growth cards want to be played. It belongs to a particular vintage of black design: power gated behind ongoing resource bleed rather than a one-time cost, the same impulse that produced creatures demanding upkeep payments and recurring sacrifices throughout the game's early years. As a piece of historical design it is more interesting than strong, a flier that wants a sacrifice subtheme built around it to do more than tax your own upkeep for incremental counters.