Kheru Bloodsucker

The toughness gate is the whole wrinkle, and it pulls this Vampire away from the usual aristocrat mold. Most death-payoffs count bodies: how many creatures hit the graveyard, regardless of size. This one counts only the sturdy ones. The drain fires on the death of something with toughness four or greater, which means it wants you running durable, beefy creatures and then losing them, the exact opposite of the wide, expendable token swarms aristocrat engines usually feed on. That puts the two halves of the card in tension with each other. The sacrifice ability eats one of your creatures to grow this one, but unless what you feed it already has toughness four or greater, the drain trigger never sees the death; you spend a creature and three mana and get a counter, nothing more. Pair the engine with resilient bodies and the halves finally cooperate: sacrifice a four-toughness blocker to the activated ability and you bank both the counter and the drain off a single creature. The reward, then, is for building around bodies that survive rather than ones that exist to die, an inversion of the standard sacrifice-fodder logic. As a drain effect on its own it is slow and conditional next to black's life-loss staples, but the axis it cares about, how sturdy a creature was when it died rather than how many died, is genuinely unusual and rarely revisited.