Brine Hag

Punisher design before the term existed. A 2/2 for four mana is deliberately unimpressive on rate, because the card is not selling a creature: it is selling a threat the opponent has to route around. Block an attacking Brine Hag and, if it dies, your blocker becomes a 0/2 forever; attack into it and your attacker takes the same treatment if it trades; burn it with a creature source and, once it dies, that creature gets shrunk too. The "base power and toughness" wording carries the weight: it overwrites the printed numbers at the bottom of the layer stack, so pumps and counters applied afterward still function, but the creature you shrank is structurally a 0/2 underneath, and a second Brine Hag death the following turn cannot un-shrink it. The "indefinitely" reminder text exists because early players had no framework for an effect that simply never ended; nothing on the card tracks duration, nothing cleans it up, and that permanence is the whole point. It belongs to an early strain of creature design built around the question "what does dying do to the board?" rather than "what does living do?", a death-trigger logic that runs through the later aristocrats lineage. The punishment never enters the calculus while the Hag is alive; the entire design is back-loaded onto the moment it leaves play, which makes it less a blocker than a tax on touching it at all.