Hissing Iguanar
A reactive payoff that turns the most common event in a board-grinding game into reach. Most "punisher" creatures key off a single resource: lands hitting the yard, your own creatures dying, opponents drawing cards. This one keys off any creature death other than its own, yours or theirs, and the trigger fires every time, which makes it scale with attrition rather than with a dedicated sacrifice engine. The damage points at players or planeswalkers only, never at creatures, so it cannot trade or police the board: it exists purely to close the door. That restriction is what separates it from a removal piece and slots it firmly as a clock the rest of the table accelerates for you. In a stalled position where chump blocks and trades pile up, each death is a free point thrown at a face, and a swarm of small creatures dying in combat becomes a quiet drain in your favor. The 3/1 body is the catch: it dies to the same incidental damage and sweepers that feed the engine. A board wipe still pays you, because dies-triggers see every creature destroyed simultaneously, so it fires for each of them; the loss is that the engine itself leaves the table on that beat, with no more deaths to convert afterward. Build a board that bleeds and you profit from the bleeding: an early aristocrats prototype priced as a curve filler with a little inevitability attached.
