Sengir Bats

A combat-feedback engine drawn in an era that mostly priced flyers as fixed bodies. The growth condition is narrower than the rate suggests: the counter is keyed to death, not to combat, so it lands when the damaged creature dies (or whenever a creature this bat damaged finally expires) rather than on impact. That phrasing is the design discipline holding the card together. Strike a blocker for lethal and survive, and the counter comes; bounce off a tougher creature without killing it, and nothing happens until that creature dies by some later means. The trigger checks for death from any source, which is the evergreen lesson: a creature the bat bloodied but did not finish still feeds the body if a burn spell, a deathtouch source, or a second attacker closes the gap that same turn. It rewards stacking damage rather than just attacking, and a Giant Growth-style trick turned on the bat can convert a non-lethal bite into a kill and a permanent counter in one motion. The set it comes from is remembered more for what it lacked than for what it printed, and this is a tidy example of the period's instinct to make a small creature interesting through a conditional payoff rather than through raw rate. The condition is fiddly enough that the body rarely snowballs on its own; it wants a deck willing to manufacture the deaths the trigger is waiting on.