Carrion Beetles

Graveyard hate in this early era split into two shapes: one-shot spells like Tormod's Crypt that traded a card for a single cleanup, and dedicated bodies that asked you to keep paying. This sits firmly in the second camp, charging a steep toll for the privilege: plus the tap to exile up to three cards from one graveyard, repeated every turn the creature survives. The targeting clause is where the restraint lives. It hits a single graveyard, not the whole table, so it nibbles rather than wipes, and the rate is tuned to be repeatable instead of explosive. Against a recursion engine that wants particular cards back (a flashback spell, a reanimation target, a threshold count), a surgical exile you can fire again and again is a fundamentally different threat than a single mass cleanup: it can sit on a key card turn after turn while the body holds a corner of the board. Stapling a recurring ability to a creature is the tradeoff that makes it fragile; the same effect on an artifact would be harder to kill. But a creature also comes back online the instant it untaps, rebuilding its value where a spent Tormod's Crypt is simply gone. What it answers is the slow graveyard deck, the one that wants its bin intact across many turns, and that is the lane it has always occupied.