Guul Draz Mucklord

Death that pays forward: the counter lands only when this body hits the graveyard, which turns what looks like a middling 2/3 into a small investment you cash out later. The design leans on the difference between a creature that dies for value and one that dies for nothing. Chump-block with it, trade it in combat, or feed it to a sacrifice effect, and the 2/3 becomes a permanent stat bump on a creature you actually want to keep. The counter also survives whatever killed the Mucklord, which is the point: removal aimed at this crocodile still leaves you a body that grew, and a board that ignored it just delayed the payoff. It rewards a deck already built to churn through small creatures, where every death is a resource rather than a loss, and it asks nothing of you on the turn it enters. The ceiling is modest by design; the counter is a single +1/+1, and the trigger is one-shot, so the card is a role-player in a wide field of go-wide and sacrifice strategies rather than an engine in its own right. What it does cleanly is close the gap between "this creature died" and "this creature accomplished something," which is the quiet job black has always assigned its expendable bodies.