Scavenging Ooze

Graveyard hate that grows. Before this design, green's answer to recursion and graveyard engines was almost nonexistent: the color got artifact and enchantment removal, fight spells, big bodies, but it had no clean way to interact with what an opponent buried. The Ooze fixed that without leaving green's lane, by attaching the hate to a repeatable mana sink instead of burning it on a single spell. Each activation is incremental: a single exiles a card, and exiling a creature pays the controller back with a counter and a point of life. That granularity is the whole engine. You can drip-feed activations all game, spending mana you would otherwise waste, until a 2/2 that traded down early is a 5/5 that traded up and gained you life along the way. The card asks for nothing in deckbuilding (no support, no enablers, just open green mana) and rewards patience: the longer the game runs, the more graveyard fuel exists to convert. Its real significance is structural. Reanimation, flashback, delve, escape, and dredge all depend on the graveyard being a safe resource, and this is what lets a fair green deck deny that safety one card at a time while building a threat. It made graveyard interaction a maindeckable green staple rather than a sideboard concession, and almost every green graveyard answer printed since has been measured against the rate it set.