Virtue of Persistence // Locthwain Scorn

Black has always fought the same reanimation problem: the payoff card that rots in your hand when the game is fast, and the removal spell that reads as a dead draw when the game goes long. This design answers both halves of that complaint on one piece of cardboard. Locthwain Scorn is a cheap kill spell with a two-life kicker, the kind of turn-two play you make on reflex, but casting it doesn't burn the card: the enchantment goes to exile and waits until you have seven mana to spend. So the early interaction that would ordinarily be a spent resource becomes a down payment on a recurring engine. Where Rise of the Dark Realms or Living Death commits an entire turn to a single explosive swing, the enchantment side here loops instead: at the beginning of each of your upkeeps it pulls a creature card from any graveyard, not only your own, onto the battlefield under your control. The tension is that the reanimation sits at the far end of the curve and does nothing to slow the clock the turn it lands, which is precisely the job the front half is built to do. It reads as removal in the opening and as inevitability in the long game, and the same card supplies both without demanding you hold the right one for the right moment.