Sengir Autocrat

The exile clause does all the balancing work, and the flavor and the rules text are the same idea: a master and three serfs bound to his land, worthless the moment he falls. The card hands you four bodies at once (itself plus three 0/1 Serfs), then ties every Serf's fate to its own survival. Kill the lord and the Serfs do not linger as chaff or graveyard fodder; they exile outright, leaving no board state to mop up. For a long time the leaves-the-battlefield trigger read as pure downside, a balancing tax on a four-mana 2/2 from an era not remembered for its power level. The reappraisal came from the other direction: a creature that mints expendable bodies and then takes them with it is a clean engine when the plan is to spend those tokens before the Autocrat dies. The 0/1 Serfs are fodder you were always going to feed into something; the exile penalty only bites if you let them sit as blockers. As an aristocrats-style battery, the constraint that once looked like fragility defines the card's window instead: three sacrifice triggers on a timer, with no leftover bodies to manage afterward.