Profaner of the Dead

Exploit usually asks a deck to keep cheap, disposable bodies on hand: the mechanic rewards owning fodder you can profitably throw away for a one-shot effect. This snake inverts the incentive by making the sacrifice a dial rather than a cost. The creature you eat sets a toughness threshold, and every opposing creature below that number returns to hand, so the size of what you feed determines how wide the sweep reaches. Sacrifice a fragile token and you clear only the flimsiest dorks; sacrifice a beefy blocker and you scoop up most of the board, gathering the glass-cannon attackers and small utility creatures that sit under the bar. The clever part is that the exploit-fuel you normally want to be small is now something you want large, because toughness is the resource being spent. The cutoff is toughness, not power, which is the wrinkle worth holding: a durable wall survives while low-toughness beaters get bounced regardless of how hard they hit. It sorts a board opposite to how a power-based effect would, punishing the fast and fragile and sparing the stout. And it is bounce, not removal, which keeps the asymmetry loud but temporary: the opponent recasts what you returned, so a single creature buys a tempo window rather than a permanent one. That framing makes it a tempo engine for decks built to re-trigger entry abilities, where the payoff is replaying the snake to swing the board again.