Champion of the Perished

The purest one-drop payoff Zombies had waited years for: a lord that grows instead of a lord that pumps. Where Death Baron and Lord of the Undead work by static buff, this scales off raw creature count, banking a permanent counter for every Zombie that follows it onto the battlefield. That distinction matters more than it looks. A static lord is a target whose removal shrinks the whole board back down; the counters here stay on Champion itself, so removing it costs no growth on the rest of your creatures. The design tension is entirely front-loaded: on an empty board it is a plain 1/1 that costs a whole turn, and it never triggers off itself, so the payoff only arrives if the deck can flood the board fast enough to outrun the removal a naked one-drop invites. Note the trigger reads "another Zombie," and tokens count as fully as hardcast bodies, which is where the deck actually wants to live: a single wide turn can turn this into a threat that demands an answer immediately or not at all. It belongs to the small class of aggressive one-drops that are worthless in the wrong hand and lethal in the right one, with almost no middle state.