Lhurgoyf

The original graveyard-as-a-resource creature, and the design template that gave a whole family of cards its name. Its power counts creature cards in all graveyards, not just yours, so its size is a running tally of how much fighting both players have done. That single decision keeps it from behaving like a build-around: you do not have to feed your own yard to make it large, you just have to wait for the game to fill up the bins on both sides. The toughness sitting one point above the power is the quiet stabilizer that keeps it from dying to its own mirror or to a chump it just traded with, and it means that for most of a game's midpoint this is a creature that outgrows whatever you point it at. The cost to the design is fragility: graveyard hate does not shrink the body so much as evaporate it, and a creature whose size lives entirely outside the battlefield is a creature an opponent can answer without touching it. Every later "Goyf" inherited some piece of this idea, the most famous of them trimming the count to creatures and lands and stapling it to a far cheaper body, but the structural conceit, a creature priced on the board state of the graveyard, starts here.