Reef Worm

Death is not the end here; it is the first installment of an escalating payment plan. Killing the 0/1 starts a chain through a 3/3 Fish, a 6/6 Whale, and a 9/9 Kraken, each token deferred behind the previous one's death. The body wants to die, and it wants you arranging the funeral: thrown in front of an attacker, fed to a sacrifice outlet, or simply pointed at by an opponent's removal. That inversion is the whole design. Spend a card to kill the worm and you have made a tempo trade the caster wins outright, since a single removal spell aimed at a 0/1 has committed you to grinding through eighteen power across three more bodies. It punishes the most reflexive play in the game: killing the smallest thing on the board. The chain also rewards anything that converts a death into the next death, so a sacrifice outlet cracks one token to queue the one above it, climbing the size ladder one funeral at a time. What breaks the engine is exile, which never triggers "dies": exiling a token removes it with nothing behind it. A blink effect on the original Worm is subtler; it exiles the nontoken card and returns it, so no death trigger fires and no Fish appears, but the Worm itself comes back intact. The recursive token text, a token that makes a token that makes a token, reads more like a puzzle box than a creature, and it has endured as a curio rather than a staple for exactly that reason.