Hekma Sentinels
The cycling payoff in creature form, built to convert the cards you were already throwing away into combat damage. The trigger fires on cycle or discard, which is the design tell: it doesn't gate the bonus behind a single keyword but rewards any disposal, so a deck that cycles to dig and one that loots to fill a graveyard both feed the same engine. Each pump is small and lasts only until end of turn, which keeps the card honest as an attacker rather than a permanent threat: the body grows the turn you commit cards to filtering, then resets, so the reward is a burst of pressure timed to the moment you're already spending resources elsewhere. That makes it a piece that wants you to chain cheap disposal in a single turn rather than spread it across many, since multiple triggers stack into a real swing. The 2/3 frame matters here too: a three-toughness body survives most early trades while you assemble the cycling chain, and the temporary buffs let it punch through blockers it couldn't otherwise. It belongs to a small family of cards that turn card-filtering quantity into board impact, the inverse of paying life or mana for the privilege of digging: here the digging itself becomes the clock.

