Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter

Two abilities stacked into one engine, and the trick is that they read the same currency in opposite directions. The first converts dead creatures into permanent stats: a sacrifice banks counters equal to the victim's power, so a fattened token, a recurring body, or a single big creature feeds the same way. The second spends that hoard all at once, stripping every counter to throw a point of -1/-1 at one target for each counter removed. That second clause is where the design tension lives. The counters behave like an investment account: every point you bank makes the body more threatening, but the only way to cash out is to give the stats back. A 5/5 with flying and lifelink already wants to be attacking, so the engine keeps asking whether this is the turn you spend the counters to clear a blocker or kill a problem creature, or whether you keep building and keep swinging. The removal half is strictly single-target and capped by what you have stored, which means the question is never how many bodies you can feed but how large a counter pile you are willing to liquidate. As a sacrifice payoff that turns death-trigger fodder into both a clock and a piece of removal, it sits in a clean spot for a black-white aristocrats build: the bodies you were sacrificing anyway become either a bigger lifelinking flier or a targeted -X/-X, depending on what the table forces out of you.