Sol'Kanar the Tainted

The old Grixis lord returns with a menu instead of a keyword salad, and the fourth item on that menu is the whole design's spine. The first three choices are the sort of end-step value you'd expect from a five-mana Elemental Demon: a card, a Gray Merchant-style drain, a Flametongue jab. Reasonable, incremental, safe. Then comes the fourth mode, which hands Sol'Kanar to an opponent, and because the ability forces you to choose one that hasn't been chosen yet, this thing is a clock counting down toward its own defection. You get three end steps of tribute before the fourth trigger stops being optional; on the turn every other line is spent, the card leaves your side of the table under someone else's control. That is a genuinely unusual constraint for a self-contained value engine: most creatures that generate this much material want protecting, while this one wants draining dry before it walks. The tension resolves in favor of the player who can win before the countdown lands, or one holding an answer for a 5/5 that just changed sides. It reframes a symmetrical-looking body into an asymmetrical race between your board state and its built-in expiry, and the deckbuilding question it poses is less "how do I keep this" than "how much do I extract before I have to give it away."