Domri's Ambush

The fight-spell lineage always carried a symmetry problem: your creature and theirs trade blows, so pointing your best body at their board risked losing the exchange to the return damage. This design keeps the "assign my power as damage" idea but drains the symmetry out of it. The +1/+1 counter resolves first and permanently, pumping the creature before it strikes, and then the damage flows one direction only: your creature deals, and takes nothing back. The counter also survives whatever happens next, so even if the opponent tries to blunt the trade by sacrificing or removing their own targeted creature in response, you keep the growth. The trade-off is that it offers no protection to the creature you point it with; if that attacker is removed before the spell resolves, you get no counter, no damage, and a dead card, the same two-for-one that hangs over every effect requiring a creature already in play. That is the standing constraint here: it needs a board to function and folds to an empty one or to instant-speed removal of your own attacker. The quiet upgrade over older fight-style effects is the target set, reaching planeswalkers as well as creatures, so a single card doubles as loyalty pressure when there is no creature worth killing. Within its requirement that you already be ahead on the battlefield, it is a cleaner expression of directed combat damage than the mutual-destruction fights it descends from.