Mer-Ek Nightblade

The second line is where the design lives. Outlast is a slow, board-stalling keyword that asks you to tap out at sorcery speed instead of attacking, and most of its payoffs reward going wide with counters. This one inverts the math. The moment any creature you control wears a +1/+1 counter, it threatens to trade up in combat, which turns a passive counter-grower into a deterrent for the whole team rather than just itself. The body does not have to do the work alone; it broadcasts the threat across the board, so an opponent attacking into a deathtouch wall has to respect every counter you have placed, including the ones outlast leaves on this creature turn after turn. That is the tension built into the rhythm: tapping to outlast means no attack and no block, so growing the counter that grants its own deathtouch trades a defensive turn now to make future defense lethal. Where one-mana removal asks what a creature can do this turn, this asks what a row of counter-bearing bodies can do over many turns, slowly converting a counters-matters board into one where any block kills. It is a payoff card masquerading as a beater, and its value scales with how many counter sources surround it rather than with anything printed on its own line.