Ichor Shade

The Shade lineage has always tied its size to a resource you spend: black mana, discarded cards, life. This one changes the currency to attrition itself. It grows only when something died or was destroyed on your turn, which reframes the body less as a mana sink and more as a payoff for the sacrifice loops and grinding board stalls that were already happening around it. The end-step timing is the interesting constraint: the counter checks once, at the point where combat and second-main removal have resolved, so a single death anywhere on the battlefield is enough, but only one growth per turn no matter how many things fell. That caps the upside deliberately, keeping it a slow accumulator rather than a runaway in a wide sacrifice engine. What it asks of a deck is a steady drip of trades and sac fodder, which is a texture aristocrat shells produce for free; the counter is just one more line in the death-ledger they were already keeping. The 2/3 body means it survives the same board sweeps of small creatures that feed it, and permanent counters mean the growth persists through end-of-turn resets. A modest engine piece, not a threat you build around: it rewards the attrition plan a deck was going to run anyway rather than demanding one.