Junk Golem

Decay built into the rules. The 0/0 base means this thing only exists because of its three counters, and every upkeep it taxes one of them just to stay on the table. Left alone, it lasts three turns and dies, with a literal expiration date stamped on its first ability. The activated ability is the lifeline, but it costs you cards. Pay one and pitch from hand, and you bank a counter back; do it twice and you start growing the body past where it began. The tension is that the discard cost works in two directions at once. To a graveyard or madness shell, throwing cards away is the upside, and the body becomes a repeatable engine for feeding the bin that happens to keep itself alive in the process. To anyone else it bleeds resources just to draw breath, a value engine running in reverse, the upkeep eating a counter while you spend mana and cards to replace it. The card sits at the exact seam where a downside becomes a payoff: a deck built to fill its own yard reads every removed counter and every pitched card as work being done; a fair deck reads the same lines as a slow, expensive way to keep a self-destructing artifact upright. That conditional identity, where the same text reads as rent or rebate depending on the shell around it, is why it lands as a graveyard-matters piece rather than a beater.