The Raven Man

Discard has always been a one-directional pressure valve in black: strip a hand and move on. This design turns that pressure into an engine both players feed. The end-step trigger doesn't care who discarded, so a symmetric discard effect, a cycling land, a madness enabler, or an opponent's own rummaging all fill the same board with fliers on your side. That's the wrinkle worth sitting with: the token machine runs on discard as a phenomenon rather than as your action, which rewards a deck built around forcing hands to empty and mouths to fill, and quietly punishes opponents who lean on loot effects to dig. A repeatable, sorcery-speed hand-tax rides underneath as insurance, prompting a discard on your turn whenever you can tap it and an opponent still holds a card, so the engine never stalls waiting on someone else to pitch a card; it converts a modest body into a value clock. The birds arrive unable to block, which frames them as a pressure resource rather than a defensive wall; the design wants you attacking. The flavor lineage is the loudest thing here: the shadowy figure who has haunted the plane's most famous villain across editions of the lore, finally given a card. For a two-drop that reads modestly, the interesting axis is behavioral. It changes what discard means at the table, making the resource everyone treats as spent suddenly worth watching.