Phyrexian Broodlings

The sacrifice outlet that turns a graveyard's worth of bodies into a single growing threat, with the counters doing the long-term storage work most outlets of its era never bothered with. Where contemporary sac engines like Nantuko Husk pumped temporarily and reset every turn, the +1/+1 counters here are permanent: each creature you feed it is banked, not borrowed. That distinction matters for how the card plays out. It is not a one-turn alpha-strike enabler so much as a slow grinder, a way to convert a flooded board or a stalled stalemate into one creature too large to ignore. The sacrifice clause is repeatable but not free: it asks for one generic mana every time, which throttles how fast you can dump a board and prices the engine as a methodical converter rather than a combo accelerant. Even so, it gave death-trigger and recursion loops a home, a place to feed tokens, soak up creatures about to die anyway, or fuel whatever cared about creatures leaving the battlefield. The 2/2 body that does the eating is modest, which is the point: the design assumes you spend resources growing it rather than getting full value on cast. It belongs to that late-nineties period when black's identity was being built around attrition and the graveyard as a resource, and it reads now as a clean, unglamorous building block from that vocabulary: not a card that wins on its own, but the kind of repeatable outlet aristocrats decks have leaned on ever since the archetype had a name.