Toluz, Clever Conductor

Discard has always been a rummaging cost: you throw a card away and it lands in the graveyard, gone unless something specific hauls it back. This design rewires that transaction. Every card you discard, from any source, gets exiled and pinned under this creature, held in escrow until it dies and hands the whole pile back to its owner. The result reframes discard as deferred draw. A cycling deck, a madness deck, a hellbent connive shell: all of them normally treat the graveyard as the exhaust pipe, and here the exhaust is instead a stockpile that only pays out on a single death trigger. That contingency does the balancing: a 3/1 that grows only when its own enter-the-battlefield connive pitches a nonland is doing double duty as both the vault and the thing an opponent most wants dead. Kill it and you fund your opponent's hand; leave it and the exile pile keeps swelling. The connive on arrival is the clean self-contained proof of concept: it draws, discards, and if the discard was a nonland, puts a counter on itself, while the discard trigger exiles that card, showing the full loop in one arrival. What makes the design sit right is that the escrow is never permanent value but a hostage negotiation, and the creature's fragile body keeps that negotiation live.