Virus Beetle

Discard stapled onto a body is a template black has run since its earliest years: strip a card, leave a creature behind. This is the effect at its smallest scale, a lone 1/1 that costs each opponent a card when it lands. The word doing the work is "each opponent." Against a single player the trade is unremarkable; across a multiplayer table the same trigger fans out, taxing every hand at once off one modest creature. The artifact typing is the quieter choice, and it points inward rather than outward: it does not free the beetle from its black casting cost, but it wires the card into the artifact-recursion, blink, and sacrifice grammar that black-adjacent shells already run. A body this cheap dies to anything and rarely trades up in combat, so its ask is not a fight; it wants to be replayed. An aristocrats loop that recasts a 1/1 turns each replay into another card gone from an opponent's hand, and once recursion is cheap the entry trigger stops being a one-time tax and becomes a recurring one. That is where the beetle earns its keep: not as a threat on the board, but as a slow, grinding hand-attack engine that happens to wear an artifact frame.