Graveblade Marauder

The 1/4 deathtouch body is the chassis, and the chassis is the whole pitch: it blocks anything, trades up against the largest threat on the board, and survives most non-removal combat to swing back. That durability is what lets the drain accrue value across turns rather than demanding one clean hit on an empty board. The second ability scales off the dead creatures piled in your yard, which inverts the usual race math for a body this small: in a deck stocked with chaff that dies cheaply (sacrifice fodder, recurring one-drops, anything that ends up in the graveyard rather than on the battlefield), a single point of combat damage can read for an arbitrary chunk of life loss. The tension is that it asks you to have already been dying: an empty graveyard makes the trigger inert, so the card pays you for attrition you were running rather than generating that attrition itself. Deathtouch is the connector that makes the rest go, threatening to trade in combat well enough that opponents balk at blocking a creature they cannot profitably stop, which is exactly how a 1/4 keeps sneaking through to deal the one damage the trigger needs. The design rewards a graveyard you have deliberately filled, and the body is built to outlast the games long enough for that graveyard to get big enough to matter.