Cockatrice

An Alpha original built around a deathtouch effect that did not yet exist as a keyword. The design solves a specific evergreen problem: making a flier dangerous to block without simply piling on power. Rather than load up the body, the template fires a combat-triggered destruction clause whether the Cockatrice is doing the blocking or running into a blocker, turning a modest flier into a credible threat against creatures it cannot kill on damage alone. The Wall exemption is the telling detail. In the earliest design vocabulary, Walls were the universal ground-stop, and exempting them preserved their job description; a Cockatrice that murdered the Wall it bounced off would have quietly invalidated an entire creature type. The delayed timing ("destroy that creature at end of combat") supplies the period-correct rigor: it preserves combat damage as the resolution point and lets the Cockatrice itself die first, so the kill is not a free pseudo-deathtouch but a mutual exchange the attacker has to weigh. Modern deathtouch collapses all of this into one keyword and a damage trigger, which is cleaner but loses the asymmetry; the Cockatrice template is the older, chunkier ancestor of the same idea, recognizable in later cards like Thicket Basilisk and the Gorgon cycles before the keyword finally consolidated the design space.