Banshee

A symmetrical pinger from an era when symmetry meant you take the hit too. The activation splits X damage, and the rounding is rigged against the controller: the target takes the half rounded down, while the larger half rounded up comes back at your own face. When X is odd, you always take strictly more than whatever you point at: at X=3, the target takes one and you take two; at X=5, the target takes two and you take three. That self-inflicted clause is the entire balancing discipline. A repeatable, untapping damage source on a four-mana body would be unremarkable today, but the design from this period priced reach in life paid by the controller rather than in mana or restriction. Want to kill a three-toughness creature? Pay seven, deal three, take four; or pay six for an even split of three apiece and trade your own life total point-for-point. The body is a 0/1, so it deals no combat damage and rarely pressures on its own; it exists purely as a slow, expensive faucet that taxes your own survival to function. It reads less like removal than like a meter you run against the clock of your own life, and the math punishes greed at an exchange that is even at best and worse than even whenever X is odd. This is black's old bargain rendered as an activated ability, the same philosophy that ran through the set's many life-for-effect designs, here asking you to decide, repeatedly, exactly how much you are willing to bleed.