Sparring Construct

A 1/1 for one mana asks to be thrown away, and the death trigger means throwing it away is the point rather than the cost. The design move here is making the body disposable on purpose: trade it in combat, feed it to a sacrifice outlet, or simply chump, and the +1/+1 counter migrates to a creature you want to keep. Where most cheap artifact creatures want to stick around to hold an equipment or pad a count, this one is built to be cashed in, with the counter landing wherever it does the most work at the moment of death. That makes it a clean piece for any deck that already treats creatures as resources to spend: sacrifice outlets get a non-mana payoff for feeding it, counter-doubling effects turn its single death into a meaningful swing, and an aggressive board gets to convert a spent one-drop into permanent stats on a threat already in play. The trigger requires a target you control, so it rarely strands the counter as long as a single creature is on the board to receive it. The conversion happens exactly once, when the construct dies, which is the honest limit of the design: there is no recursion built in, no way to milk the trigger twice. It earns its slot by making one act of dying productive, the kind of quiet floor-of-the-curve payoff a spend-creatures deck is happy to bolt on.