Safana, Calimport Cutthroat

The initiative is usually framed as a race prize: seize it, dive the Undercity, cash out the room rewards before someone knocks you out of the descent. This design reads it differently, checking only whether you still hold it when your end step arrives and paying a Treasure if you do (three at once if you've finished a dungeon along the way). That reframing turns possession from a one-time payout into a standing dividend, one that keeps minting mana long after the dungeon's own rewards are spent. Menace on the 3/2 is the recovery tool for the loop: since the initiative passes through combat damage, an attacker that forces two blockers can crash back and reclaim it the moment it slips away, then resume the drip. Because this design invites a second commander into the shell, the Treasure stream can be pointed anywhere: ritual acceleration, an artifact-count payoff, or simply a splash color grafted onto a mono-black base. What keeps the engine honest is that its fuel is a contested resource: every opponent is actively trying to take the initiative off you, so a value stream that persists only as long as you can defend it is a fundamentally different problem than one that resolves and stays yours. This card is built around holding a thing under siege rather than the descent that usually earns it.