Skeleton Scavengers

A regenerator that grows every time it cheats death, built around a feedback loop most regeneration cards of its era never bothered with. The escalating fee is what keeps the engine honest: the first regeneration is cheap because the creature is small, but each shield it survives adds a counter, and the next shield costs more to raise. That self-balancing tax is the whole point. Left to grind through a stalled board, it ratchets from a chip blocker into a genuine threat one combat step at a time, paying for the privilege of getting bigger by surviving. The body starts as a 0/0 that only exists because it enters with a counter, which leaves the engine fragile to anything that removes counters or kills it before you have mana to protect it. But that fragility is the cost of an effect that compounds rather than caps. Most regeneration of its time treated the keyword as a static insurance policy: a flat fee to ignore one death per turn. This treats regeneration as an accumulating resource instead, where each near-death is also a growth trigger, and the mana you sink into staying alive is never wasted. It rewards a board state where combat keeps happening and you keep having mana left over, turning a defensive ability into a slow inevitability.