Vein Ripper

The Blood Artist drain effect scaled up until it became a threat in its own right. Where Blood Artist trades one life per death, this pays out two-and-two on every creature that dies anywhere: a four-point swing that turns a board wipe from a reset into a payoff and any sacrifice shell into a life-total engine. The two abilities feed each other in a way the drain effect never did before. The Ward is not a mana tax but a demand that the opponent sacrifice a creature to target it, and the death trigger then punishes the very sacrifice they paid to remove it: the protection cost becomes fuel for the payoff. Against an opponent with an empty board, the Ward cannot be paid at all, so single-target removal simply cannot look at it. What keeps a triple-black flyer of this size honest is a specific seam in that logic. Ward walls off spot removal, but a sweeper walks straight around it, since it targets nothing. And the drain cannot save this creature from a wrath: when the sweeper resolves, everything dies at once, this one included. It triggers for each of those deaths, but the triggers hit the stack as it heads to the graveyard alongside the rest of the board, so a well-timed board wipe answers it and hands you a fistful of drain in the same breath. The way through is the answer that never has to look at it.