Lichenthrope

Damage rewritten as a slow-bleeding debuff rather than a clean end-of-turn reset: that is the whole design experiment, and it cuts in the unintuitive direction. Because incoming damage stacks as -1/-1 counters instead of marking the creature normally, nothing clears at end of turn. A single five-point hit (a big burn spell, a chunky blocker, several attackers piling on at once) puts the body to 0 toughness and kills it outright, exactly as it would a vanilla 5/5. The difference is what happens with small, repeated damage: a 2/2 trading into it leaves two permanent -1/-1 counters, and the once-per-upkeep removal claws back only one per turn. Ground it down across a few combats and it dies to a sum it would have shrugged off if the damage had been normal marked damage. So the card is the inverse of a regeneration body: it survives a single ping fine but degrades under attrition, where ordinary creatures degrade under one big swing and survive attrition. It reads as an early probe into using -1/-1 counters as a damage-substitution layer, treating a defensive creature as a counter sponge rather than a toughness wall. Magic returned to that same counter math later and pointed it the other way, where wither and infect made the substitution an offensive weapon instead of a flavorful liability bolted to a Fungus.