Death's Approach

A removal spell whose price is paid by the game itself. For one mana, this Aura kills nothing on an empty graveyard and grows lethal as the bodies pile up: the -X/-X counts the creature cards sitting in the enchanted creature's controller's graveyard, which means it rewards the kind of grinding, attrition-soaked board states where creatures trade and die in waves. The structural quirk is that it answers a threat by counting the corpses around it, so it is dead early and overwhelming late, the inverse of most cheap black removal that wants to be cast on turn one. It reads a single graveyard (whoever controls the creature it enchants) rather than a general count, which ties its power to how that player's game has gone rather than to how you built your deck; against a control mirror or a lone fatty out of an otherwise creatureless deck it does next to nothing, while in a creature-heavy slugfest it becomes a one-mana answer to almost anything. That conditionality is the whole trade: black gets a removal spell cheaper than the rate would normally allow, in exchange for accepting that the card's value lives entirely in a graveyard's contents. It is the rare aura that asks you to read the board's history before you read its present.