Tangled Colony
Most "make a token when it dies" rats pay out a flat count; this one scales its payout to the amount of damage dealt to it this turn, which quietly turns combat and burn into a stockpiling mechanic. A blocker that chips it for two, a Shock that finishes it, a fight spell that trades: each raises the token count that arrives when it finally dies. The body can't block, so it's built to run into things face-first and cash the damage in on the way out, and the tokens inherit that same restriction, so the whole package is a swarm that only ever pushes forward. The design lever worth noticing is that opponents are punished for interacting on the front. Killing it cleanly (a bounce, an edict, exile) yields nothing, but the natural line (block it, burn it, trade with it) is precisely what feeds the death trigger. That tension is the card's real engine: it forces the opponent to choose between letting a 3/2 connect and paying for the removal in rat tokens, and it rewards a controlling player for finding an answer that sidesteps damage entirely.



