A-Thornmantle Striker

The rebalanced version of a card built around a payoff that black rarely gets to have: an Elf lord's tribal scaling stapled to interaction. Where most creature-based removal offers a fixed number, this one lets the board pay for the effect, and the two modes split cleanly between playing against creatures and playing against counters. The counter-removal line is the stranger of the two: it strips loyalty from planeswalkers, shrinks anything wearing +1/+1 counters, and can even peel the ability-defining counters off sagas or oil-fueled threats, all scaled to your Elf count. The -X/-X line is the one that reads as removal on the surface, a shrink effect that clears a blocker or kills a creature outright once the tribe is deep enough. What ties both together is the same design instinct that governs any lord-dependent effect: the body arrives useful (a 4/3 for four that trades and attacks on its own) but the ability wants a full Elf board behind it, so the card asks to be cast late in a curve it also reinforces. That the entry effect is a choose-one on the enter trigger rather than a repeatable engine keeps it honest; you get one scaled interaction per copy, and the incentive to flood the board with Elves is baked into how much that interaction is worth.