Thanos, Death's Consort
The trigger reads across the whole battlefield, not just your side of it, and it never releases what it collects: every creature that dies anywhere becomes a permanent +1/+1 counter here. That decoupling is the design. You are not powering a sacrifice engine to grow this body; you are collecting a tax on violence regardless of who starts it. Combat trades across the table, an aristocrats loop three seats over, a one-sided sweeper that clears everyone else's board while this survives: each death adds to the total, and lifelink converts every point of accumulated size straight into life when the growing body connects. The controller can pace the trigger deliberately (a removal spell, a favorable block, a sacrifice outlet all register as another creature dying) while banking every death they had no hand in. It is an attrition payoff built as a beneficiary rather than an engine part: you do not have to assemble the death machine, only to be the last thing standing once someone runs it. The one honest limit is that the trigger needs this creature already in play to receive its reward, so a symmetrical sweeper that kills it alongside everything else grants nothing. In a genuinely stalled, creatureless standoff it sits at a 3/3 and waits, which is the price of a body that grows only while the graveyard is being fed.
