Taborax, Hope's Demise
A cheap flyer that converts your own attrition into a growing threat, and the two payoffs stack rather than compete. Every nontoken creature you lose feeds the body toward the lifelink threshold, so a grinding board state that would normally bleed you out instead armors up into a self-stabilizing clock. The Cleric clause is where the card wants you to build: when a Cleric dies you get the counter regardless, and on top of it the trigger offers to trade a life point for a fresh card. That is the same death paying twice, size and selection at once, which is unusually generous for a three-mana body. The life payment is the only brake on the loop, and it cuts against the grain: the card that solves your attrition also asks you to spend the very resource its lifelink is meant to bank, so a deck leaning hard on the draw can outpace its own stabilization. Black sacrifice payoffs usually reward a body count with tokens or reach; this one pays in growth and card flow from a slot small enough to lead a curve rather than cap it. The counters matter past the lifelink line, too, quietly pushing the creature out of burn range the longer a sacrifice deck is allowed to run its engine.
