Tinybones, Trinket Thief
Discard has always struggled to close. Strip an opponent's hand and you have bought inevitability but no clock: the plan grinds a grip down to zero and then needs some unrelated finisher to actually end the game, which is why hand-attack shells historically leaned on The Rack and Shrieking Affliction to convert an empty grip into a wound. This design folds both phases of that plan onto one two-mana body. The passive fires once each end step (not once per card) if an opponent discarded that turn, netting you a card at the cost of a point of your own life; the reward is flat, but a dedicated discard deck forces so many discards that the engine hums on nearly every turn cycle. Then the axis flips. That same trigger only pays out while opponents still have cards to shed, so the draw engine is the mid-game phase: it thins the hand toward empty. Once a hand is empty, six mana punishes exactly that state, making each hand-less opponent lose ten life directly. It is life loss rather than damage, so it slips past both damage prevention and the redirection tricks that answer combat. The two abilities are sequential rather than identical: one profits from the discard on the way down, the other collects once there is nothing left to discard. The 1/2 frame is incidental; the point is that a black subtheme long surviving on scattered Mind Rot effects finally has both its engine and its kill condition on the same card.


