Cleopatra, Exiled Pharaoh

The two named abilities are engineered to feed each other, and the seam between them is the whole design. The end-step trigger builds counters onto up to two other legendary creatures, and the target line does not care whose they are: you can juice your own board, or salt an opponent's legend, because the payoff triggers on any countered legendary creature that dies, not just yours. That widens things considerably. Every counter you stack becomes card advantage waiting to be cashed, since a legendary creature carrying counters draws one card per counter when it dies. The two-life loss is a flat, mandatory tax per death trigger, not a scaling cost and not something you choose to pay; it fires whether the dying creature was yours or theirs, so a wide, counter-heavy board can bleed you if everything collapses at once. That is the throttle the design leans on. The engine rewards a table where legends die on your terms, and it invites you to weaponize an opponent's removal against their own threats by seeding them with counters first. The 2/4 body sits underneath all of this doing nothing flashy, because the card is not built to attack; it is the hub of a legendary-heavy deck that treats death as a draw step. It answers the old graveyard-payoff problem (how to keep a draw-on-death engine from being either trivial or unreachable) by making counters take turns to grow before they pay, with the life loss keeping you honest about how big your board gets.