Xira, the Golden Sting

The egg counter is a bet on a creature dying, and the design's cleverest move is that it doesn't care whose creature or whose kill. When Xira attacks, the counter lands on another target creature: often an opponent's, but frequently your own, since a marked creature you already plan to sacrifice, block with, or lose in a scrap turns its death into a card and a flying Insect. The trigger fires on death so long as the egg counter is still there, which means the payoff is stapled to the eventual demise rather than the attack itself. That timing changes the calculus around removal. A marked creature becomes awkward to remove: killing it feeds the Xira player, so opponents tend to leave the target alive or route their removal elsewhere, and the counter sits patiently until combat, an edict, or a board wipe does the accounting. The counter also refuses to double up, so each attack has to find a fresh host, spreading eggs across the battlefield and building a wide incubation web over successive turns. Wrapped in a 3/3 with flying and haste, the body swings the turn it arrives and keeps pressuring life totals while the network matures underneath it. The tension the design resolves is how to give a small attacker a reason to keep swinging into larger boards: not by rewarding the connection, but by rewarding the death it eventually seeds.