Invasion of Azgol // Ashen Reaper

The battle chassis leans on a defensive investment your opponent never actually controls: you cast the Siege, you own it, and when it's defeated the transformed back face is yours to keep. But the flip is optional gravy, because the entry trigger fires an edict and shaves a point off a chosen player the instant the Siege lands, so two mana buys a creature or planeswalker off the board and a life whether or not the battle ever falls. Everything after that is upside. Ashen Reaper reads as a compact aristocrats payoff wearing a menace body: its end-step check doesn't care about deaths specifically, but about any permanent hitting a graveyard from the battlefield that turn, so a fetched-and-sacrificed land, a cracked Treasure, or a chumped attacker all feed it a counter just as readily as a creature dying. That widens the deck it wants far past a pure sacrifice shell into anything churning through permanents. The design's real trick is the loop it implies: the edict is a one-shot piece of board attrition, and the back half is a recurring beater that grows on the exact kind of attrition that opened the game up, punishing the grind it started. The counter accrual is the discipline holding it in check, since the body arrives small and only earns its size on turns the game is already coming apart.