Karstoderm

Darksteel was an artifact set, and most of its green-and-white cards were busy punishing artifacts or profiting from them. Here the punishment runs inward. A four-mana beast that arrives as a 5/5 sounds like a deal, but the counters bleed off with every artifact that hits the battlefield, opponents' artifacts included. In a set drowning in cheap equipment, mana rocks, and Affinity creatures, the body shrinks turn over turn until nothing is left and it dies as a 0/0. The design is a kind of anti-affinity tax meter: it scales its own downside to the metagame's artifact density, which in Darksteel was suffocating. The cleaner read is that it was never really priced for the abundant-artifact world it shipped into. Play it in a deck (and against an opponent) that keeps artifacts off the table and it is a respectable beater; play it in the environment it was actually printed in and it is a melting ice sculpture. That tension is the whole identity: a counter package built to be a liability is a strange thing to staple to an aggressive green creature, and it makes Karstoderm one of the era's more honest illustrations of how environment-dependent a stat line can be. The 0/0 base printing also makes it fragile to anything that wipes counters, since stripping them outright kills it rather than just shrinking it.