Rockslide Elemental
A 1/1 first striker that asks you to feed it. The growth trigger fires off any other creature dying, yours or your opponent's, which makes the build instruction unusually literal: surround it with bodies you intend to lose. The first strike is the detail that turns the engine from a curiosity into a threat, because every counter you bank is damage that lands before the blocker swings back. Stack a few deaths in a single combat or a single sacrifice loop and the elemental crosses from chip damage to lethal in one turn, with first strike ensuring the math runs in your favor. The tension in the design is that the body starts at 1/1: it does nothing until the deaths start coming, and it dies to anything before it gets going, so the payoff is entirely back-loaded onto a board state you have to manufacture. It belongs in a deck that treats creatures as fuel rather than assets, an aristocrats shell where tokens and chump blockers are inputs to a sacrifice engine. The "may" on the trigger is a small mercy that keeps it from forcing growth you do not want, but in practice you almost always want the counter; the optionality matters mostly for stack-order and undying-style interactions. A clean piece of attrition-payoff design from an era when red was beginning to flirt with the kind of grindy, death-matters value that other colors usually owned.
