Undercity Necrolisk

The sacrifice outlet that also wants to be the finisher, which is a harder design balance than it looks. Most aristocrat payoffs split the labor: one card eats your creatures, another turns the deaths into damage or drain. This rolls both jobs into a single body, charging one mana per sacrifice to convert a dying creature into permanent size and a turn's worth of evasion. The menace is the part doing the real work. A growing 3/3 is just a clock; a growing 3/3 that demands two blockers every time it swings is a threat that outscales a chump-block defense, which is exactly the wall an aristocrat board tends to throw up. The sorcery-speed restriction is the tax for stacking those effects on one creature: all the growth has to be committed on your main phase, before combat math is settled, and there is a real cost to that. Because you have to feed and pump before the opponent acts, you are exposed to instant-speed removal in response; a well-timed kill spell can eat your fodder, strand your mana, and leave you holding nothing. That vulnerability is the price of the pump, not a shield against it. The counters are permanent, so the investment sticks across turns, but the evasion resets each turn, which rewards a steady supply of fodder over a single explosive sacrifice. It is built to close a long grind, not to steal a game out of nowhere.