Jötun Grunt

Cumulative upkeep almost always produced cards that buckle under their own escalation: the tax climbs every turn, and whatever it is attached to collapses before it pays off. The trick here is that the upkeep cost is not a resource you spend but a resource you wield. Each turn the cost asks you to bottom two cards from a single graveyard for each age counter, which means the tax doubles as graveyard hate aimed at threshold, dredge, flashback, reanimation, and every engine that treats the yard as a second hand. Aim the cost at your own graveyard when no opponent's matters and it is functionally free; aim it at theirs and you dismantle their plan while a 4/4 for attacks. The escalation that sinks most cumulative-upkeep designs becomes a meter of how much disruption you have extracted: by the time the age counters outpace the available graveyard cards, the body has usually done its job. Bottoming rather than exiling matters, since the disruption is temporary and a slow opponent can refill, but against the engines this creature is built to hate it buys enough turns to close. The drawback is the reason to run it, and the body is priced as if the upkeep were a liability rather than a recurring effect you wanted in the first place.