Shadow-Rite Priest

The anthem is the sales pitch, but the sacrifice line is the machine. Pay five total mana, tap, and sacrifice another Cleric, and it fetches any black creature straight onto the battlefield: tutor and reanimation-adjacent cheating folded into a single activation. That reframes what a Cleric board is worth. Every expendable body becomes potential fuel, and a stalled aggressive draw converts into a search for the single biggest black threat in your deck. The +1/+1 buff is not what fills the board; it is what makes the Clerics already standing worth keeping around until you can cash one in. The price enforces discipline: five mana, another Cleric to feed it, and the tap symbol mean it fires once per turn cycle and demands real investment. It cannot loop itself cheaply, since you are always spending one creature to find another that may not even be a Cleric. What earns the design its edge is the instant-speed activation. It can ambush a combat step, or drop a blocker on the opponent's turn, turning a spare body into a threat the moment a window opens. The result is a lord that stops being a lord the moment the board is deep enough: the anthem sells the tribal shell, and the sacrifice line quietly turns that shell into an instant-speed toolbox.