Tribute to Hunger

Edict effects have always paid for their power with a single concession: the controller picks what dies. This is the version that softens that concession rather than fighting it. Diabolic Edict and its kin strip a creature at instant speed and walk away; the life gain stapled here is a quiet acknowledgment that the opponent will hand you their least valuable body, so the spell asks the toughness of whatever they sacrifice to pay you back instead. The structural truth of any edict is that it shines against the lone large threat and stumbles against a board it cannot prune, and Tribute to Hunger inherits both. Against a single fat blocker the opponent has no choice, and the gain scales with the toughness they are forced to feed it; against a token swarm it reverts to a plain creature-killer for a bit of incidental life. The instant-speed window is doing the work, letting it function as removal, a combat ambush against a lone attacker, and a stabilizing measure all in one cast. It does not solve the edict's chronic weakness (a player holding a junk creature can always sacrifice that), but among the cheap unconditional kill spells that ignore hexproof and indestructible by never targeting the creature itself, this is the one that treats the life total as part of the bargain rather than collateral.