Syphon Soul

Multiplayer is the design context that makes this card make sense. In a duel, the rate is mediocre: three mana to deal two damage to your opponent and gain two life is a deal nobody is taking. Around a table of four, the math inverts. The same three mana now drains six total and refills you for six, a twelve-point life swing that scales with the pod without scaling the cost. The card is a clean early expression of a design principle that would later define entire products: an effect priced for one-on-one becomes a finisher when the "each other player" clause turns it into a group tax. Black's drain identity runs through this card directly into the territory that later cards would expand on (Exsanguinate, Debt to the Deathless, Crypt Ghast's whole reason to exist), but the original is unconditional, undercosted for its true context, and asks nothing of the rest of your deck. It is also a quiet piece of evidence that the set understood it was designing for tables, not pairs, decades before the format that would canonize that assumption had a name.