Mind Maggots

A creature that asks you to pay for its body with other creatures, which is a strange bargain in any era: it arrives as a 2/2 and grows two counters for every creature you pitch from hand, so a fully loaded entrance can dwarf the four-mana investment. The friction is obvious and exactly the point. You are spending cards to inflate one body, with no protection, no evasion, and no payoff for the discarded creatures beyond the counters themselves. That is a lot of resources funneled into a target that any removal spell undoes for one mana. The design belongs to a specific moment in black's history, when discard-as-cost was being explored as a way to convert a flooded hand into raw stats rather than as fuel for a graveyard engine. Later black cards learned to make the discard do double duty: pitch a creature, then reanimate it, or trigger something on the way to the yard. Here the discard is pure tax, the counters the only return, and the gap between those two ideas is most of what separates a card like this from the discard-for-value designs that came after it. It reads now as a study in why "big body, no resilience" rarely justifies emptying a hand.