Deathgreeter

The aristocrats payoff stripped to its skeleton: no tokens, no drain, no death-trigger value beyond the simplest possible reward, a single point of life every time another creature dies. The clause is deliberately broad in two directions that matter. It cares about any creature dying, not just your own, so a board wipe or a grinding combat stall feeds it as readily as a sacrifice loop does. And it triggers per death, which is where the one-mana body justifies itself: in a deck built to churn creatures through a sacrifice outlet, the life gain stacks fast enough to outrace an aggressor or fuel something that cares about a high life total. The trigger condition is also where it draws a sharp line, "dies" meaning put into a graveyard from the battlefield, so a creature bounced, exiled, or tucked gives it nothing. What it also does not do is close games, which is the line it walks against later sacrifice payoffs that turned those same deaths into damage or card draw. This is the floor of that design lineage, the version that only asks the deaths to keep you alive while a more dangerous engine does the killing. As a one-drop it gets onto the table before the sacrifice machine is online and quietly accumulates value once it is, which is the entire pitch: cheap, passive, and content to be the smallest cog in a larger loop.