Embalmed Brawler

Amplify always asked you to overcommit your hand, fanning out creatures of the right type to make a body huge the instant it enters, and most of the cycle stopped there: the counters were pure upside, free stats for showing your cards. This one attached a toll to combat. Every counter that swells it also bleeds you whenever it attacks or blocks, so the better your opening reveal goes, the more it costs to actually swing the threat you built. A hand stuffed with Zombies can turn the base 2/2 into a 5/5 or 6/6 on arrival, but every swing of a body that size drains three or four life from you (one for each counter, not for its total power), and the life loss is yours, not your opponent's. That self-inflicted cost reframes the card from a payoff into a wager: the more the amplify reveal rewards you, the faster your own creature races your life total toward zero. It is a beater that punishes you for succeeding too well, demanding you close the game before the bleed finishes the job your opponent never started. Among the tribal tools of its era it stands apart as the one that hands you a real threat and then dares you to commit it, a pointed reminder that amplify was never actually free even when the counters cost nothing up front.