Grim Initiate

Every other creature in an amass deck pours its stat line into one shared Army; this one pours its death into it. First strike keeps the 1/1 relevant in early combat, but the loop that matters fires when the body dies, converting the corpse into a permanent +1/+1 counter on the same Army the rest of the deck has been feeding. That inverts the usual math on a one-drop. A cheap creature that trades or gets chumped normally represents a lost card, but here the death is throughput: sacrifice outlets and unfavorable blocks stop being downside because the Army persists across every exchange while the individual bodies do not. It reframes how the whole shell values its small creatures. The token stays on the board and accumulates, so the deck plays wide and tall at once out of a pile of expendable Zombies, and the corpse of each one still counts. Grim Initiate is the clearest single expression of that engine: a creature whose best turn is frequently the one it spends dying.