Obsessive Pursuit

Most aristocrats-adjacent cards leave a gap open that this one closes: the engine that generates fodder and the engine that rewards spending it usually live on separate cards, and here they share a two-mana enchantment. The upkeep trigger drains a life and hands you a Clue every turn, and every Clue is a permanent waiting to be sacrificed; the attack trigger then scales its +1/+1 counters by exactly how many permanents you've sacrificed that turn. The Clue sets the floor. It sacrifices for value on its own, so even a build doing nothing else nudges the attack trigger toward a counter a turn. The ceiling is the lifelink clause at three sacrifices, which turns the counters into a stabilizing swing rather than just a bigger threat and repays the life the upkeep keeps siphoning off. The tension in the design runs against ordinary board development: the biggest attacks want you to have emptied your permanents right before combat, so every sacrifice feeding the counters is a permanent no longer doing whatever it was doing. What the card asks for is a shell that treats permanents as ammunition (Treasure, Food, expendable tokens, creatures with dying triggers), spent on purpose in the same turn it swings. What it gives that shell is both a standing reason to sacrifice and a single target worth pointing the whole pile at.