Grakmaw, Skyclave Ravager

A body that recycles counters into more counters, then hands you the whole pile back on death. It enters holding three +1/+1 counters, feeds on the death of any other creature you control that had a +1/+1 counter, and when it finally dies it leaves behind a Hydra token equal to everything it had banked. What most counter payoffs want is for the counters to stay put; this one treats its own death as a transfer of value rather than a loss, so the size you invested never actually leaves the battlefield. The result is a two-stage engine that rewards a board built on +1/+1 counters and punishes removal that targets the wrong thing. Kill it early and you hand back a modest token; let it sit while your other creatures trade off and it fattens on each death before ballooning into a large body all over again. The 0/0 printed base is the tension it resolves: without the three entering counters it would not survive its own resolution, which quietly forces every subsequent counter interaction to route through a creature that starts life at exactly the size the counters make it. Golgari has a long history of graveyard-value creatures that trade in cards or life; this one trades in counters, keeping a single resource in motion across two bodies and refusing to let a kill spell settle the account.