Cackling Slasher

The conditional counter is the entire design decision: a deathtoucher that arrives as a 3/3 in a quiet board state, and a 4/4 once a creature has already died this turn. That gate is what makes the card interesting, because it does not care whose creature died. An opponent's removal spell pointed at your board, a trade in the previous combat, your own sacrifice outlet fired before you cast it: any of them flips the condition and hands you the bigger body. So the upgrade lands precisely in the games where a deathtoucher earns its slot, the grinding, trade-heavy midgame where blocking up trumps racing. Note the shape of the reward: it is binary, not cumulative. One creature dying this turn is worth exactly the same +1/+1 counter as five, so this is not a graveyard payoff that swells over the course of a long game. It is a single threshold, checked once on entry, that either fires or does not. Deathtouch on a 4/4 is a genuine asymmetry in combat math, trading up regardless of the counter and stonewalling the opponent's alpha strike when they overcommit. The whole thing plays as a soft reward for the attrition player: nothing to build around, no counting, just a body that tends to show up one size larger in exactly the games where black wants it to.