Marchesa, the Black Rose

Dethrone was built to give the trailing player a reason to swing at the leader, and Marchesa weaponizes the keyword into a recursion engine that punishes the table for ever pulling ahead. The granting clause matters more than her own counter: every creature you control now grows when it attacks whoever sits at the top of the life total, which means your board is constantly accruing the +1/+1 counters that feed the third line. That third ability is the whole architecture: a creature with a counter that dies comes back under your control at the next end step, so each of your bodies carries an implicit insurance policy as long as it has gotten a swing in or been pumped. The interaction veterans chase is the deliberate self-sacrifice loop. Crack your own counter-bearing creature to a sacrifice outlet, collect the death trigger, and it returns at end step ready to do the same enters-the-battlefield work next turn. She converts removal, blocks, and your own outlets into raw value rather than losses, and the counters that fuel her are a resource you are incentivized to generate constantly rather than hoard. The cost of the engine is that it runs on aggression: the counters only flow if your creatures are attacking, and the recursion only protects what you have managed to grow, so the deck cannot sit back and durdle while the engine assembles itself.