Vicious Hunger

The double-black cost is the design tell here: this is removal that asks you to be the black deck, not the deck splashing black, and the payoff for that commitment is the lifegain rider stapled to the kill. Two damage is a modest ceiling, enough to clear an early creature or a depleted attacker, and the two life gained is calibrated to matter most in the aggressive mirror where every point of life and tempo is contested. Note that the rider only ever moves your own total: the damage goes to a creature, never a face, so the swing is a two-life buffer on your side rather than a clock on the opponent's. Locking the effect to your own main phase keeps it a proactive board-tidying tool rather than a combat ambush, so you cannot ambush an attacker or answer a pump spell with it. It belongs to the long line of black point-removal-with-upside, the cards that bolt a small life swing onto a creature-only kill and measure themselves against the universal benchmark of cheap removal. It never pretended to scale into the late game; it was built to win attrition races at the bottom of the curve, where trading a card for a creature and a cushion of life is exactly the exchange a black aggro or midrange deck wants to be making.