Riders of the Mark

Affinity has spent most of its life stapled to artifacts, but here it counts bodies instead: the fuller your Human board, the closer this drops toward a hasty 7/4 for a single red. The tension is what happens at end step. Attack with it and it bounces itself back to hand, converting its toughness into four 1/1 Human Soldiers. That is not a downside so much as an engine: each swing pays out four tokens, those tokens deepen the affinity discount, and the discount recasts the whole thing for less next turn. It is a recursive Human-generator dressed as a beater, and the loop feeds itself.

The design discipline is in the direction of the return. It only bounces if it attacked, and it hands you toughness (four), not power (seven), so the payout is the smaller number. That asymmetry blocks the pure value ratchet: you cannot sit back and farm tokens defensively, and you cannot bank the big body across turns. You have to keep sending it into combat to keep the tokens coming, exposing it to blocks and removal each time it commits. Trample and haste make the aggressive line the intended one, and the bounce means a wrath the turn after your attack whiffs on it entirely. A go-wide Human payoff that rebuilds the wide board it needs, one attack at a time.