Rapacious Guest

Three abilities stitched into one closed loop, and the seam is the interesting part. Combat damage to a player makes Food; sacrificing Food grows this creature; and when it leaves the battlefield, an opponent loses life equal to how large it has grown. The card is engineered so its own value snowballs into its own payoff: every point of power accumulated through Food sacrifice is stored as a threat that gets cashed the moment the body exits, whether it dies, gets bounced, or is exiled. That last clause inverts the normal blocking-and-removal math against it. A menace 2/2 is the sort of thing opponents happily trade with, but here killing it (or trying to remove it any other way) fires the life-loss trigger, and leaving it alone lets it keep eating Food and counting higher. Note that this is life loss, not a drain: the controller banks a Food economy, not a life-swing engine, so the payoff is pure damage to a single opponent rather than a self-sustaining lifegain loop. The controller often wants it gone as much as the opponent wants it stuck around, which is an unusual reading of aristocrats tension. The second trigger is deliberately source-agnostic: any Food you sacrifice from anywhere feeds a counter, so this rewards a shell already committed to Food and sacrifice rather than trying to be that shell alone. The eventual departure is not a loss but the entire point of the setup.