Shadow of Mortality

The sticker price is a bluff. Fifteen mana for a 7/7 is a joke you never pay: the cost reduction scales with exactly how much life you have already spent, and in black, spending life is not a drawback but the core resource. Every point below your starting total shaves a mana off the top, so bleeding yourself out (fetchlands, painlands, life-loss engines, aggressive early damage) can land the body for a handful of mana or, when the arithmetic swings far enough, for the floor alone. The design turns your own attrition into a countdown clock. Where most reduction mechanics ask you to convert other cards into discounts (Affinity counting artifacts, delve exiling the graveyard), this one converts the one number you are usually trying to protect, and it pays out best precisely when you are in the most danger. The card is a reward for a game state everyone else treats as a loss condition: a beater that gets cheaper as the door closes on you. The 7/7 body is deliberately unremarkable, a plain vanilla stat line with no evasion and no protection, because the interesting decision was never what it does once it resolves. It was how low you are willing to go to cast it.