Starving Revenant

The enter trigger is a self-throttling engine dressed up as card selection: surveil 2 first, then every card you choose to leave on top becomes a draw for three life. Keep both and you draw two and pay six; keep neither and you bin two into the yard, taking nothing. You set the dial each time, spending life for velocity only when you want it. That choice matters because the second ability is hungry for a stocked graveyard. Once eight or more permanent cards sit there, every draw drains one point off an opponent and returns one to you: a Gray Merchant trickle stretched across the rest of the game rather than fired all at once. The two halves are wired to feed each other. The same surveil that pushes you toward the descend threshold is the surveil that switches the drain on, and any incidental draw running afterward compounds the swing. Graveyard-payoff decks always face the same problem: how to reach the threshold without stalling out. Here the payoff card does its own filling and pays you in cards while it does it, and the three-life-per-draw cost stops the enter trigger from being a free two-card windfall. You trade life up front and claw it back through the drain later. A 4/4 that can simply attack keeps the whole thing from folding into a value spell with no clock.