Priest of the Crossing
Aristocrats decks usually cash their death triggers into damage or drain, one loss at a time, and the counting resets the moment the turn ends. This flips the ledger. It reads the graveyard as a growth engine instead of a resource pool: every creature that died under your control feeds a batch of counters onto everything you still have, and it does so at every end step, not just your own. That last detail is what pulls it out of the "combo payoff" bucket and into "defensive rattlesnake." Trade in your opponent's combat step, block and lose bodies on their turn, and their end step hands the survivors the reinforcements. The reward scales with a board that is actively getting smaller, which is a strange and productive tension for a white creature to embody: the more your fodder dies, the wider your remaining team swings. The counters are permanent, so the buffs compound across turns as long as the sacrifice or trading keeps flowing, which turns a token engine into a stack of increasingly lethal permanents rather than a temporary anthem. The flying 3/3 body is almost incidental to the plan; the ability wants a sacrifice outlet and a stream of expendable creatures, and it grows its own beneficiaries with the same trigger.
