Liliana's Elite

The bargain here is patience for size, and the size is retroactive: this Zombie is worth exactly as many creatures as your graveyard already holds the moment it resolves, so with three bodies down it hits as a 4/4, with none it is a 1/1 that no one pays three mana for. Because the effect is a static +1/+1 counted continuously, nothing is spent to grow it: every creature that dies, mills over, or gets discarded quietly lifts both numbers, no card and no activation required. Tarmogoyf makes the useful contrast, counting card types across all graveyards and swelling fast even in fair, grindy games; this one keys off a narrower, self-built pile of dead creatures, so it fattens up precisely in decks that were already treating the yard as a resource. The tradeoff is the flip side of the appeal: it is smallest on turn three, when a wall would help most, and empties out entirely if your graveyard is hated away. But there is no cap on the count, so its ceiling drifts upward as the game goes long, which suits reanimator and aristocrats shells that manufacture creature death as a matter of routine. Cast into a bare graveyard it is filler; cast on top of one full of bodies, it is a cheap, open-ended beater that scales with the very thing those decks are already doing.