Unburied Earthcarver

The sacrifice-and-grow chassis is old news in black; what this one does is fold the payoff into the creature doing the eating rather than routing value elsewhere. The activation is taxed by design: two mana plus a creature to add a single +1/+1 counter is a deliberately expensive exchange, which keeps a two-mana 2/2 from snowballing on curve. You are not looping cheap tokens into a threat inside a single turn; the mana cost throttles growth to roughly one counter per activation you can actually afford, so the body scales with how much fodder you generate and how much mana is left to spare. That makes it less a combo piece and more a mana-and-material sink for decks already churning out expendable bodies: a place to bury the leftovers from a sacrifice engine and get a bigger attacker in return. Because the counters are permanent and the ability lives entirely on the creature, removal answers the whole plan in one card, which is the natural pressure valve on something that would otherwise grow unbounded. It is worth being honest about the ceiling: with no evasion printed on it, a fatter Earthcarver is still a ground creature that a single chump blocker can hold off, so the growth buys raw stats rather than guaranteed damage. It fills a familiar role rather than opening new ground: the black two-drop that converts a board's worth of chaff into one large attacker, priced so the conversion never comes free.