Osai Vultures

Carrion counters are the design hook, and they make this bird stranger than its body suggests. The vulture does not feed on its own kills, does not care whose creature died, and does not care how: it simply taxes the battlefield's death rate, banking a counter at each end step a creature died, and lets the controller cash those counters in for a combat-step pump. That is a remarkable structure for 1994, when most growth creatures were tied to specific tribes, specific spells, or upkeep payments the controller had to fund themselves. Osai Vultures externalizes the accumulation entirely; the rest of the table feeds the engine while the controller decides when to spend. The conversion is deliberately stingy in two directions: it takes two counters per +1/+1, and the boost only lasts until end of turn, so a counter spent is a counter gone and the bird snaps back to a 1/1 next turn. That double tax is what keeps the card harmless: a 1/1 flier that needs four deaths to swing once for three is a clock measured in eras, not turns. The lineage is worth naming. This is a structural ancestor of the "grows when something dies" idea that later ran through cards like Nantuko Husk and Scavenging Ooze, with the wrinkle that white almost never gets graveyard-adjacent growth at all. Legends handed the color an ability it has spent decades mostly not getting again, gated behind a conversion cost awkward enough to keep it from mattering.