Thraben Standard Bearer

The activated ability runs looting in reverse: instead of drawing toward a hand, it spends a card from hand to manufacture a body on the battlefield. That conversion is the reason to run it. A 1/1 for one mana is filler, but a 1/1 that turns dead cards (a flooded land, a spell you cannot cast, a creature already headed for the graveyard) into more 1/1s gives a go-wide deck a slow but renewable supply of token fodder. The rate is deliberately punishing: two mana and a card for a single 1/1 is a bad exchange in isolation, which is the friction that keeps this from being a token engine you simply leave running. It rewards decks that already want the discard (graveyard payoffs, madness, anything with a surplus of late-game cards it would rather convert than let rot) and decks that turn each token into more than a point of power: sacrifice triggers, anthem effects, fling-style outlets. Left alone, it quietly grinds toward an army; slotted into a discard-as-resource shell, it becomes the engine that refuses to run out of attackers.