Slitherhead

Most scavenge creatures ask you to pay their mana cost a second time from the yard, treating the counter dump as a premium for the privilege of paying twice. This one charges nothing: a free graveyard-to-counter conversion, which is the whole reason it exists. The trade-off lives in the math. Scavenge moves counters matched to the card's power, so a 1/1 only ever delivers a single one; the frail body is precisely the leash on a zero-cost payoff. What the free price buys is not size but timing, a permanent counter you can place the same turn you spend mana elsewhere, so the dead creature becomes a delayed second card. That makes its real home a deck already filling its own graveyard and genuinely happy to see one counter land somewhere useful, a narrower ask than "free" implies. Cast for a single hybrid pip, it slots into either color without a splash, but the design's honesty is in the ceiling: cheap to cast, free to scavenge, and built to never produce more than the one counter it was always going to give. The card knows exactly how small it is, and the zero cost is calibrated against that smallness rather than in spite of it.