Etched Slith

The original Slith cycle rewarded connecting with a creature by fattening it up: land a hit, add a +1/+1 counter, watch a modestly costed body snowball out of range. This revisits that design with a subtractive twist. The counter still lands on the attacker, but the trigger it spawns hands you a second choice: pull a counter off something else. That phrasing is deliberately open. It reads +1/+1 counters on a creature, loyalty on a planeswalker, charge counters on an artifact, chapter counters ticking on a saga, or a poison counter riding on an opponent; if it is a counter sitting on a permanent or on an opposing player, the Slith can shave it. The wording draws one specific line: the removal targets another permanent or an opponent. "Another permanent" is symmetric, so you can trim loyalty off an enemy planeswalker or lift a stun counter off your own creature, but the player half restricts you to opponents, which means you cannot walk your own poison count back down. Note the ordering, too: the removal is a reflexive trigger off the growth trigger, so you commit to the attack and the counter first, then decide what to shrink. Menace is the connective tissue that makes any of it fire, since the body has to get through for the engine to turn over. It rarely does the heavy lifting alone, but as a small evasive body that pays you twice for connecting, it belongs to a lineage of aggressive early-drops that ask nothing of the deck except the willingness to attack.