Scurrilous Sentry

Connive was built to reward aggression without asking the attack to land first, and this creature milks that timing hard: it filters when it enters, then filters again the instant you declare it as an attacker, before blockers are even chosen. Every nonland card you pitch tacks on a +1/+1 counter, so the loot loop and the growth loop are the same action. Menace is the piece that makes the swings dangerous to answer in combat, because a body that grows each turn punishes the double-block menace forces, and a 2/3 that becomes a 3/4 and then a 4/5 while smoothing its own draws is a lethal clock that also fixes its hand along the way. What that connive really buys is selection, not raw cards: looting swaps a fragile spell or a dead land for something live, which is why the four-mana 2/3 shell reads worse than the engine plays. The starting body is the honest tax on all of this. It dies to nearly any removal before it snowballs, and the enters-connive is the small consolation that a killed-on-sight copy at least got to dig once. As a design it refines the value-attacker lineage: where the older on-hit lookers gave you card selection only if they connected, connive front-loads the filtering onto attack declaration, so the pressure and the digging arrive together instead of one gating the other.