Banewhip Punisher

The two halves of this card are deliberately mismatched in tempo, and that mismatch is the whole design. The enters trigger arrives as a soft shrink: a -1/-1 counter that trades combat math more often than it kills, only outright removing a creature with one toughness. The sacrifice ability is where the kill lives, but it can only finish a creature that already carries a -1/-1 counter, which means the card is built to set up its own targets. Drop it, weaken something, then later pay the activation and convert that shrunk creature into a dead one. The counter requirement is what keeps the destruction from being open-ended: this is not removal you can point anywhere, it is removal that only resolves on a creature you already marked, or one some other counter source has marked for you. That self-contained loop is rare on a single card. Most -1/-1 counter payoffs ask you to assemble the counter and the kill from separate pieces; this one staples both onto one body, which is also why the body is expendable. The 2/2 frame is fodder, present mainly to deliver the trigger and then be spent on the activation. Built for a color block organized around -1/-1 counter attrition, it gets sharper as those counters proliferate on the board, since the sacrifice clause then becomes a flexible answer to anything already marked rather than a two-step you have to begin yourself.