Lethal Exploit

The base rate is deliberately unremarkable: two mana for -2/-2 kills a two-toughness body and shrugs off anything larger, a floor that keeps the card fair when your board is empty. The payoff lives in the scaling clause, which counts the modified creatures you control as the spell goes on the stack and deepens the single target's debuff by an additional -1/-1 for each one. That is the design's cleverness: the number never lands on your own creatures, only on the thing you are killing, so every Equipment you equipped, every Aura you stuck, every +1/+1 counter you accrued from proliferate or a counter-based synergy sharpens the kill without your board doing anything but existing. The developments that advance your own aggression and the developments that grow your removal are the same developments, so the deck's offense and its interaction stop competing for slots and pull in one direction. Because the count locks at cast, the spell rewards building the board before you point it at a threat rather than holding up an answer on a bare table; you cannot flash in extra modifications after the spell is on the stack to make it bigger. The result is a card that behaves like a minor trick in a deck that ignores modification and like a genuine hard kill for a large creature in the deck built to feed it, all without ever printing a number bigger than the one your own permanents supply.