Rex, Cyber-Hound

The reason this dog is more than a two-power beater is the loop that runs through exile. Combat damage fills a graveyard and banks energy; the energy pays to exile creature cards under brain counters; and each exiled card hands Rex its activated abilities, permanently, so long as it stays out there. The design stacks a toolbox onto a body: a Robot Dog that grows not in stats but in options, borrowing the pilot seat of every creature it has ever tucked away. The graveyard-exile step is deliberately a sorcery-speed action, which keeps the assembly slow and telegraphed even as the payoff (a menagerie of stolen abilities firing on one creature) can spiral. What it wants is a graveyard stocked with creatures whose abilities are worth wearing: mana engines, repeatable damage, sacrifice payoffs. The mill on hit is doing double duty, seeding fuel for the exile step while chipping at a library, and the two-energy trickle keeps the toolbox affordable without giving it away for free. It is a self-contained value engine wearing the smallest possible face: connect once, and the machine starts feeding itself the parts it needs to keep connecting.