Renegade Demon

Five power for five mana, no text and no keyword: the entire bill is paid in three toughness. That is the trade at the heart of vanilla black beatdown, and it is sharper than the stat line suggests. Five power clears the four-toughness midrange clog and ends a game in four unanswered swings; three toughness means the threat is real only while it lives, which against burn and chump-fodder is rarely long. The hulking sacrificial Demon usually arrives with a printed cost (an upkeep payment, a life tax, an attack requirement); here the cost is folded entirely into the body, leaving a creature that hits hard and dies to almost anything, including most of the bodies it would otherwise crush. It cannot attack into open mana with any confidence, and it asks nothing of the cards around it. As pure curve-topping common design it does one job: supply a fast, breakable clock for a deck that wants raw pressure and accepts that the clock resets to zero against a single removal spell. There is no engine to build around and no synergy to chase. The body carries the entire proposition, and the fragility is what keeps that proposition from being free.