Festering Mummy

The genius of this little Zombie is that its removal half does not depend on combat. A 1/1 dies easily, by definition, but the trigger fires no matter how it gets there: chump-blocked, swept by a board wipe, fed to a sacrifice outlet, or simply traded away. That makes the -1/-1 counter feel less like a death rattle and more like a payout you can collect on your own schedule. The counter itself is the right kind of subtraction for a black aggro shell: it shrinks an opposing creature permanently rather than dealing damage that resets at end of turn, and against anything already sitting at one toughness it reads as a kill spell stapled to a one-drop. The body pressures early, then converts into interaction the moment it stops attacking, a two-stage curve filler that rarely sits dead in hand. The catch is that the conversion happens exactly once: the Mummy triggers when it dies, and short of a recursion engine to bring it back, you are spending one creature to remove one creature. That is the whole transaction, and it is a fair one. The -1/-1 counter sits in a broader design language of permanent stat reduction (the wither-style attrition that replaces burn with shrinkage), and this is about the cheapest on-ramp into that approach: a creature built to perish, rewarding you for arranging the where and when.