Phyrexian Soulgorger

An 8/8 for three mana is the kind of stat-cost ratio that doesn't happen by accident, and the upkeep explains the discount: the body is enormous because the payment is a creature, then two, then three, then four, escalating one body per turn until it eats your board whole. The cumulative upkeep here is among the most aggressive ever printed, where the deadline isn't a quantity of mana but a quantity of bodies, and the curve climbs fast enough that nobody pays it honestly past a turn or two. What turns the card interesting is that the cost it demands is exactly the resource a sacrifice deck most wants to spend: feed it tokens, feed it creatures with death triggers, and the upkeep stops reading like a tax and starts reading like an outlet you happen to have an 8/8 stapled to. It rewards the kind of build that already wanted to throw creatures away, inverting the usual relationship where escalating cost is pure friction you race against. Left alone it is a fuse counting down to a board wipe of one, since the linear scaling means the fourth upkeep alone asks for four sacrifices. Surrounded by the right fodder, it is the rare cumulative upkeep card whose ongoing cost is a feature, because the engine that pays it is the engine that wins.