Doomed Dissenter

Two mana for a 1/1 looks like a bad rate until you read the body as a delivery vehicle rather than a creature. The point is the conversion: a fragile attacker that chump-blocks, feeds a sacrifice outlet, or eats a removal spell, and leaves behind a 2/2 black Zombie that is bigger than what you gave up. The death trigger is what makes an opponent's answers awkward. Spend a card to kill the 1/1 and they walk into a sturdier replacement; line up a favorable-looking combat block and the math sours the same way. What the Zombie does not do is repeat the trick: it is a vanilla 2/2 with no trigger of its own, so the engine is a single upgrade, not a recurring loop. That single conversion is the whole design idea. Most aristocrat fodder wants to be as close to free as possible, because its only job is to die; this one charges full freight and pays back a token that outsizes the original, so the thing you sacrifice is itself a step up. It belongs to a strain of black two-drops that refuse to die for nothing, the kind of structural floor later sacrifice-payload designs would build on more aggressively.