Ravenloft Adventurer
Most initiative payoffs point outward: they push you into the Undercity dungeon and reward the exploration itself. This one turns the mechanic into a slow assassination engine that feeds on death rather than on descent. The replacement effect is the hinge: while it is on the battlefield, every opponent's creature that would die instead lands in exile under a hit counter, quietly accumulating a body count that never returns. Combat removal, sacrifice, your own board wipes, their own chump blocks (all of it becomes ammunition). Then the attack trigger cashes the pile in, but only once you've cleared a dungeon, so the payoff is gated behind actually completing a dungeon rather than merely taking the initiative for a turn. That gate is what keeps the scaling honest: an unattended hit-counter stockpile does nothing until the dungeon is finished and the attack is declared. The design stacks three separate systems (the initiative, a graveyard-hate replacement clause, and a dungeon-completion payoff) into one four-mana body, and the interesting seam is that the counting is per-attack and permanent. Every creature the defending player owns that dies while this stays alive raises the ceiling on the next attack, so the threat isn't the 3/4 in front of you: it's the exile zone filling up behind it. A grindy, attrition-shaped take on the assassin, built for tables where creatures trade all game and the losses are supposed to be forgotten.
