Sinister Gnarlbark
A card-advantage engine that pays its own rent in creatures. The 0/4 body is the tell: this was never built to attack, only to sit and turn your end step into a draw. What makes the trade interesting is that the blight cost lands where black most wants it. The -1/-1 counter does not have to be a tax; on a token engine or an aristocrats board it becomes fuel, a repeatable way to shrink a sacrifice-outlet target into range, weaken your own creature into a death trigger, or clear the way for something you would rather sacrifice than keep. The blight keyword formalizes what black players used to improvise with stray -1/-1 sources: a steady, self-inflicted drip of counters that a well-built board metabolizes rather than fears. The tradeoff runs one direction, and it is deliberate. Each turn you draw, you must also weaken something you control, so the card asks for a battlefield deep enough that the counter always has a good home and punishes a board too thin to absorb it. Left alone with nothing worth targeting, the counters start eating the Gnarlbark itself, which is the natural governor on an otherwise open-ended draw engine: the drip cannot outrun the deck's ability to feed it without hollowing out the very creature doing the drawing.
