Teysa, Orzhov Scion

The second ability is the engine that launched the aristocrat lineage: every black creature death under her watch leaves a flier behind, turning attrition into board presence and converting sacrifice fodder into a growing army. That clause is the design seed for an entire family of death-payoff commanders, and it remains the cleanest early statement of the idea: death matters, and you get paid for it in bodies. The first ability is the one most players forget she has, because sacrificing three white creatures is a steep tax most Orzhov shells are not built to pay; it reads as a holdover from a more symmetric guild-card era, a removal valve you cash in only after the Spirits have piled up. The tension between the two modes is the whole character of the card: the token engine quietly manufactures the very white creatures the exile ability demands, so a long enough game folds back on itself, the deaths feeding the tokens feeding the removal. The 2/3 body is the liability the engine is bolted onto; she carries no ward, no hexproof, no recursion, so the deck has to defend her with outside help and any spot-removal spell answers her cleanly. Later black-white death-payoff designs would widen the trigger, drop the color restriction, or skip the second mode entirely, but this is where the death-trigger token engine got its first commander-grade frame.