Carnage Wurm

A 6/6 trampler for seven mana is already a fair end-of-curve body, but bloodthirst 3 is the lever: deal any combat or burn damage to an opponent first, and the wurm shows up as a 9/9, trample turning that excess into a clock no single blocker contains. The design tension is sequencing. Bloodthirst checks for damage dealt this turn before the creature enters, so the payoff lives entirely in turns where you have already connected, which makes the card a follow-up rather than an opener: the second beater that punishes an opponent who took a hit and now stares down a body too large to chump profitably. That ordering is what separates bloodthirst from the static counter-doublers and ETB pumps that read similarly. The bonus is conditional on the board state you build in the same turn, not on a permanent you already control, so the card rewards committing to the attack before you commit the wurm. Trample is the load-bearing keyword here, not a luxury: a 9/9 that gets chumped is a 6/6 that gets chumped, and the entire reason to pay the bloodthirst tax is to push damage through the chump rather than around it. It is a clean expression of the mechanic at the top of the curve, where the three extra counters read as the largest swing the keyword offers.