Scourge of the Skyclaves

The two-mana price is a lie the card tells about itself. Cast it bare and it costs a black and a generic, but its body is pegged to the highest life total on the table: at the untouched twenty, it enters as a 0/0 and dies. The card is not built to be cast on turn two; it is built to be cast after damage has already been dealt, when the leading life total has slid down and the demon fattens accordingly. That inversion is the whole design: most creatures shrink as the game grinds, this one grows, rewarding an aggressive deck for the very attrition it inflicts. The kicker turns the payoff into a closer. Cast it kicked and every player loses half their life rounded up, which lops the highest total in half and, in the same breath, inflates the demon's power and toughness by the same amount it just carved off the opponent. The life-loss and the stat calculation feed each other: you pay to shrink the leaders, and the shrinking is what makes the body enormous. It reads as a self-scaling threat with a built-in reach mechanism, a design that asks you to lower the ceiling on purpose so your own creature can reach through it.