Asmira, Holy Avenger
A growth engine that runs on attrition, an odd thing to bolt onto an evasive body in green-white. The end-step trigger counts every creature put into your graveyard from the battlefield this turn, not just the ones that died in combat: blocked attackers, sacrificed tokens, your own creatures traded away in a board stall, all of it feeds the counter. That timing window is the whole pitch. Because the count resets each turn, the payoff favors the turn where a battle goes sideways and bodies pile up, rewarding you precisely when your board is collapsing rather than asking you to set up a loop in advance. The design sits at an awkward seam between an aggressive evasive threat (a 2/3 flyer wants to attack early) and a grindy value piece (the counters only arrive after creatures start dying, which usually means the game has slowed down). Asmira wants both halves of the game and only gets paid in the second. The card belongs to the early experiments in tying creature death to a reward, a thread Wizards would later pull into a full mechanical family, but here the trigger is broad, restricted to your own losses, and entirely passive: you do not sacrifice, you do not pay, you simply tally your dead at end of turn and grow.
