Profane Memento

The trigger keys off the most reliable resource in any creature-heavy game: dead creatures, but only your opponent's. It does not care how a creature card reaches their graveyard, whether it dies in combat, gets milled, or is discarded; it cares only that the card is theirs and that it is a creature. That makes it a soft answer to two unrelated plans at once. Against a deck attacking with bodies, the life ticks up one trade at a time as the board grinds down. Against a strategy that wants creatures in the graveyard on purpose (reanimation, recursion, anything that treats the yard as a resource), every card they bury hands you life, so the engine they are assembling actively feeds the math against them. Worth being precise about what this is and is not: it does not exile, does not block recursion, does not touch the graveyard at all. It is not interaction, it is a counterweight. The opponent's plan resolves exactly as intended; you simply bank life off the dead bodies it leaves behind, and that life buffer can be enough to outlast a clock that depends on creatures cycling through the yard. It is a one-mana artifact that asks nothing else of your deck and adds nothing to your board: a passive lifegain tax that costs the opponent nothing to ignore and quietly widens the gap whenever their plan runs through their own creatures. The ceiling is low and the floor is blank, which is the honest shape of a single-mana hedge.