Hungry Lynx
A green cat that hands its opponent a growing army of rats and then eats them. The design closes a loop that most green creatures leave open: it manufactures its own combat interaction rather than waiting for one. The end-step trigger forces an opponent to build a token every turn, a rare instance of a card generating fodder on the wrong side of the table, and the protection-from-Rats clause turns that fodder into a one-way street. The rats can't block or bite the cats, so every one of them either dies chumping something else or sits uselessly on defense, and each death pumps the whole cat squad. The deathtouch is the wrinkle that makes the arrangement teeter: an opponent can send those 1/1s into your other creatures and trade favorably, which is precisely the pressure valve that keeps the engine from being a free snowball. What makes it a genuine puzzle is the tension baked into every rat: it is a liability the moment it dies, an asset the moment it lives, and the card's owner and the card's target are constantly negotiating which. The Cat-and-Rat framing is played straight in the mechanics, not just the flavor: two creature types locked in a predator-prey relationship where one grows by the other's demise. It is a whole tribal microcosm printed on a single two-mana body.
