Rotting Giant

Three power for two mana, with a meter attached: every attack and every block demands a card exiled from your graveyard, or the Zombie Giant sacrifices itself on the spot. That makes this a creature with a finite number of swings set by how much fuel you are willing to spend. What sharpens the design is the direction it pulls. Most black graveyard payoffs of its era, threshold among them, want the bin filling up; this one empties it, one card per combat, putting it in direct competition with the flashback spells and threshold counts you might otherwise be feeding. That is the whole argument the era's graveyard cards were having, rendered in a single creature: a card sitting in your yard is worth something, and here are two effects fighting over it. The exile clause also caps the body. Once the graveyard runs dry, the next combat kills it, so a rate that looks above the curve drags back to fair the moment you spend a turn or two swinging. It reads less like a creature you wanted to cast and more like a statement about resource economy, with a respectable body attached so the statement could go to combat.