Unruly Mob

It enters as a 1/1 with no immediate value, asking you to turn your own creatures into food before it does anything at all. Every other creature you control that dies hands it a single +1/+1 counter, which places it firmly in sacrifice and aristocrat territory: chump-blocks, fodder tokens, and trade-down attacks read as setup rather than loss. The contrast with the mass-payoff cards that count every permanent's death is the deliberately small scale: one creature, one counter, no drain, no tokens, no card draw. The growth is the whole reward, so the Mob lives or dies on how cheaply you can pipeline bodies into it. The trigger's restriction does real work, too. It fires only on creatures you control, so an opponent losing creatures does nothing, and a board wipe that destroys everything at once kills the Mob alongside its fuel. Its ability still triggers for each of your other creatures dying in that sweep, but it sits in the graveyard with them and never collects the counters. The engine therefore wants deaths it can outlive (sacrifice fodder, blockers, one-for-one trades) rather than a single sweep that takes the payoff down with the supply line. As common-rarity design it teaches the death-matters loop in miniature: a low-stakes engine that demonstrates the principle before the rares exploit it at scale.