Akki Ember-Keeper

The modified-creatures theme this card anchors is a payoff that fires on death rather than on impact: it rewards the moment your equipped, aura-carrying, or counter-carrying creatures trade away, not the moment they connect. That inverts the usual aggressive logic, where you protect the body you've spent mana suiting up. Here the death is the trigger, so a creature carrying an aura or a counter converts into a fresh Spirit as it leaves, and the token is a new body to re-slot the surviving gear onto. That last distinction matters: Equipment stays on the battlefield when its holder dies, so it can be moved onto the next creature, while Auras go to the graveyard with the body they were attached to. Equipment, then, is the piece that keeps the chain going. The Spirit is small (a 1/1 with no evasion, no keyword, no color), but it is a legal recipient for that dropped Equipment. The "nontoken modified" clause is the load-bearing restriction: the Spirits it makes can't feed the loop, so the engine can't spiral off its own output, and every trigger costs you a real, invested creature. At two mana with two power, it lands early enough to justify running the modification package in an aggressive shell, which is the only place a death-payoff engine can afford to sit.