Shadow Urchin

Most self-sacrifice payoffs ask you to feed a hungry outlet a body you already have; this one manufactures the death it wants to profit from. Attacking forces blight, shrinking a creature you control down by one, and the second ability converts any counter-bearing creature's death into a burst of impulse card advantage scaled to how many counters it was carrying. This is not a card hunting for creatures that happen to have counters: it steadily degrades its own board into fuel, and the same combat step that threatens damage quietly loads the payoff. The impulse window matters more than the raw count. Because the exiled cards vanish at your next end step, this is advantage that rots if you cannot deploy it immediately, which pushes the deck toward cheap spells and same-turn action rather than hoarding. A one-drop dying with a single counter exiles one card you must play now; pile blight onto a creature before it dies and the refill grows but never stops being perishable. The counter economy runs in both directions: blight erodes stats going in, death is the moment it pays out, so the design wants creatures deployed to expire on purpose rather than survive. It is an engine that treats attrition as intake, where losing bodies is the plan and the -1/-1 counters serve as the meter tracking how much library you get to burn through before the window shuts.