Spymaster's Vault

The strange marriage here is grafting connive, a card-filtering keyword built for attacking creatures, onto a death count. Connive normally lets a swinging creature loot away dead weight and grow off whatever it discards; here the ability scales to bodies lost that turn instead of combat. It nets no cards, since you discard exactly what you draw, but the filtering smooths a hand toward its best cards, and the +1/+1 counters land for each nonland card pitched, so discarding spare spells fattens the target while discarding lands only sifts. Bolting that onto "creatures that died this turn" reads like two mechanics from different design conversations that happened to click. The ability wants a sacrifice engine already humming before you tap it, plus a specific creature on board to absorb all that filtering and all those counters at once. That is a narrow ask for a land, paid in the usual currency: a black pip on top of the tap, and a slow entry unless there is already a Swamp under your control. What it buys, once the deck is doing the work, is a burst of card selection and a single ballooned threat at instant speed, without spending a card from hand. The interest lives in where the payoff sits: converting board attrition into hand quality and a growing body, a job usually handed to spells and creatures, tucked into a slot that costs no card. It asks the deck to already be built around dying, then rewards that plan from the land drop.