Brass-Talon Chimera

A self-cannibalizing tribe of one, built on a Chimera count that no set ever delivered. The design is a chain letter: each copy sacrifices itself to permanently grow another Chimera and hand it first strike, the intent being that you funnel several bodies into a single oversized threat that keeps the boosts after the contributors are gone. The "lasts indefinitely" wording matters because it predates modern counter-and-keyword templating; the +2/+2 sticks as a real counter, but the first strike grants are layered effects that survive only as long as the recipient does. That makes the card a permanence engine that quietly trades board presence for one growing threat, the artifact-creature equivalent of pouring every resource into a single swing. The ability targets any Chimera creature, but that is precisely the problem: the type is one of Magic's emptiest tribal lines, almost never printed, so in practice the recipients are other copies of this same card. The grand vision of stacking several boosts onto one first-striking monster always bottoms out at the same arithmetic: sacrifice one 2/2 to make a 4/4 with first strike, and repeat only if you happen to draw more bodies to spend. The build-around exists, but it points almost exclusively back at itself. It reads as the seed of a tribe Wizards declined to plant: a sacrifice-for-permanent-growth template that needed a wider supporting cast to mean anything, later refined in cleaner shells.