Taste of Blood

A single point of life swung either direction is the smallest unit Magic deals in, and this card moves exactly one in each: a point off the opponent, a point onto you. That two-point net swing for one black mana is the floor of what a burn-and-drain effect can do, and the shell that wants it is one built to win a life-total race from both ends, chipping the opponent down while the life gain blunts the inevitable counterattack. The restriction is built into the ceiling, not bolted on: one damage and one life is so modest that the card lives or dies on density, the willingness to run a stack of one-point pingers and treat the cumulative drain as the win condition rather than any single cast. It cannot touch creatures, which keeps it out of the removal conversation entirely and pins it to reach: the face damage that closes a game the board has already stalled. As a piece of common-rarity aggression it is honest about being a numbers game, the kind of card that does nothing alone and everything massed alongside others doing the same incremental work.