Mari, the Killing Quill
An opponent's creature that dies here goes to the graveyard first, then gets snatched out and exiled with a hit counter and its former owner's name attached: a debt logged against the player, not just a dead body cleaned off the board. The second ability is how you collect. Deathtouch across your Assassins, Mercenaries, and Rogues turns nearly any point of combat damage into a favorable trade, and connecting with a player lets you pull a hit counter off a card that player owns in exile for a card and two Treasures. The design forces a specific line: you want opponents' creatures dying to stock the exile, then you want small evasive bodies poking through the right player to cash the counters in. It punishes a creature twice, once when it dies and again when its exile pays you off. What keeps the payoff earned is that the trigger is combat-damage-gated and locked to three creature types: no passive draining, you have to attack the exact player who owns the counter and land the hit. Build wide and cheap across the named tribes and the counters become card-and-Treasure fuel; run a pile of unrelated fatties and the engine's back half idles. The 3/2 is not the finisher. This is a rules-text engine you assemble a board around, and the board, not any single swing, closes the game.
