Lowland Basilisk
Green's early answer to the problem of giving a creature lethal-by-contact without breaking it open: rather than killing on impact, the destroy resolves at end of combat, and that delay is what keeps a 1/3 from policing the whole board. The timing window cuts in two directions. A creature this trades with can still get its licks in during the same combat (anything with first strike that kills the basilisk outright walks away clean), and the opponent has the entire combat step to respond, sacrifice, or bounce the doomed creature before the destroy ever resolves. The body is built to block and survive: three toughness soaks up an attacker a one-power creature could never threaten, then drags it to the grave on the back end. Modern deathtouch collapsed all of this into a single keyword that kills the instant damage is marked, which is cleaner and strictly stronger, and that collapse is exactly what stranded the basilisk template. What reads today as a clumsy conditional removal creature is a snapshot of green's design vocabulary before the toolbox got standardized: the destroy-at-end-of-combat clause does the work deathtouch would later do in one word, while handing the opponent the extra rope the older wording was forced to give.

