Serpent Warrior

Pay three life when it arrives and you get a body two points bigger than the era's clean rate usually allowed at the cost. That toll is the textbook way designers of the period priced a stat line up past the curve: you get the body, but the card taxes your own life total to hand it to you. This is the same accounting logic that runs through black's history, from the painlands to the Phyrexian mana of later sets to creatures that trade life for tempo; the resource being spent is just life instead of mana. What makes this a clean specimen of the idea is that the drawback is pure and unconditional: no upside attached to the loss, no synergy hook, just a flat three-life toll levied once on arrival. The legibility is the point. The tradeoff sits right on the surface, plainly stated and easy to weigh, with nothing hidden in a rules interaction or a conditional trigger. The bargain is a perfectly honest statement of black's central premise, that power in this color is almost always paid for in something other than mana.