The Balrog, Flame of Udûn
A 7/7 trampler for five in Rakdos is an aggressive rate on its own, but the second line of text is where the design actually lives. This is a beater built with a self-imposed leash: killing an opponent's legendary creature sends it to the bottom of its owner's library, so its tenure on the battlefield is priced not in mana or removal but in the legends your opponents are willing to sacrifice. That inversion is the clever part. Most drawbacks trigger on your own missteps or the opponent's answers; this one hands the opponent a lever they may not want to pull, since spending a legendary creature's death just to sink your threat to the bottom of your library is rarely a clean trade. The result is a body that reads as a downside card yet plays as a resilient one where legends are scarce, and a genuine liability in the singleton-heavy tables where they are everywhere. A creature whose power level scales inversely with the density of a single card type across the board is a strange thing to build, and the source material earns it: a horror that only leaves once something equally storied throws itself into the pit alongside it.
