Phyrexian Ingester

Imprint usually locks in a static reference (a color choice, a card to copy, a spell to flash back), but here it does something stranger: it eats a creature and wears the stats. The base body is a forgettable 3/3 for seven, which is the joke and the point. The card is priced as a removal-plus-threat package, where the threat scales to whatever it removes. Exile something with a fat stat line and you get a sizable beater for your trouble; exile a 1/1 mana dork and you have spent seven mana to trade poorly. The mechanic ties the payoff to the cost of solving the problem, an elegant feedback loop: the bigger the threat across the table, the bigger your answer becomes. Two details keep it honest. It exiles rather than destroys, sidestepping recursion and death triggers entirely, which is the cleaner answer when the question is a card you cannot afford to see again. And it only hits nontoken creatures, so the format's go-wide swarms walk past it untouched; the design wants you pointing it at a single overgrown threat, not at a board of small ones. Note that the exile is permanent: there is no clause returning the imprinted creature when the Ingester leaves the battlefield, so the card it eats stays gone for good. It is the rare creature that functions as both a kill spell and the reward for casting one, with the size of the prize set entirely by the board you walk into.