Stalactite Stalker
The descend trigger is doing something quietly clever here: it turns a self-mill or aristocrats engine into a growth clock. A one-mana 1/1 with menace is the kind of body that trades down almost immediately, so the counter is the whole gambit, and it costs nothing to earn if your deck is already feeding its own graveyard. The design's real hook is the sacrifice line at the bottom. Because the -X/-X scales off this creature's power, every counter it stacks up doubles as removal you can cash in later, converting accumulated size into a hard kill on someone else's threat at instant speed. The descend clock and the sacrifice pump aren't two separate abilities so much as one two-stage plan, where a graveyard-heavy deck stores its payoff on the board as combat pressure until the moment you'd rather spend it as a shrink spell. The end-step timing on the counter is the honest cost: growth is gated to turns you actually descended, so the deck has to feed its graveyard on schedule rather than hope a card falls in once. Left alone by an opponent who can't profitably block through menace, it becomes a removal spell that got bigger while you weren't looking.



