Kresh the Bloodbraided
The 3/3 body prices itself like a finisher, and that gap only resolves once you read the trigger underneath it: this is a death-payoff that scales with the dying creature's power, not its toughness or its mana value. That one word does all the work. A token dying barely moves the needle; a fattened beater going to the graveyard mid-combat can dump six or eight counters at once. And because the trigger fires on any creature dying, your removal spells, your chump blocks, and your sacrifice outlets all double as growth spells. The counters are real +1/+1 counters, so they persist long after the creature that earned them is gone, accumulating across a whole game of attrition. This is the Jund attrition plan rendered as a single card: kill things, trade things, grind the board to wreckage, and let the corpse pile turn a midrange body into something that ends games. The cleanest expression is the deliberate self-sacrifice loop, throwing a high-power creature under the knife to convert its stats into permanent stats on something that actually attacks. Where most death-matters payoffs traffic in tokens, drain triggers, or card draw, this one is denominated in the number aristocrat decks usually treat as incidental: raw last-known power, paid forward onto a creature that wants to swing for it.
