Tainted Adversary

Pump-and-pay design at its most honest: a 2/3 deathtouch body you can drop as a curve-filler, or a mana sink that reloads a late-game board when there's nothing better to do. The math is where the tension lives. Each payment buys a single +1/+1 counter but two decayed Zombie tokens, so the counters grow the Adversary linearly while the token count grows twice as fast. That asymmetry is deliberate: the counters go on a permanent creature with deathtouch (a durable long-term threat), while the tokens are one-shot attackers that can't block and sacrifice themselves once they swing. The tokens don't vanish if you hold them back; they sit on the battlefield until you send them into the red zone or feed them to something hungrier, which is the whole use case. Decayed is the leash that keeps the ability from spiraling: no chump-blocking, no defensive wall, so every payment biases the board toward offense or toward a sacrifice outlet rather than toward stall. The Adversary cycle shares this shape (a modest early creature that scales into a mana dump), but this one is the aristocrats engine of the group. Twice-as-many bodies is precisely the language sacrifice decks speak, and the deathtouch counter-holder gives the payments a durable payoff the token halves lack. The real trick is that the cheap deathtoucher and the game-ending mana sink are the same card, priced so neither mode feels like a compromise.