Gristle Grinner

The trigger fires on any creature dying, yours or the opponent's, which is the design knot worth untangling. The body is a non-starter on rate; the card pays that premium to become a combat-math problem for whoever sits across from it. In a stalled board, every chump block and every trade pumps it, so the opponent's removal and the opponent's blockers both feed the thing they are trying to stop. The pump lasts only until end of turn, which means it does nothing to make the creature stick around: it widens the gap during a single combat and then resets, asking you to convert the swing immediately rather than bank it. That places it in the lineage of death-payoff fatties, the slow attrition cards that punish board-clogging matchups, but without the permanent growth that makes a creature like that genuinely scary over multiple turns. So it looks like an engine and plays like a one-shot threat: most valuable in the exact grindy standoff where it is also slowest to matter. It is a tidy expression of an early-era idea about how black could reward attrition, sized for a slower game than most decks want to play.