Ninja of the Hand

Deathtouch on a small body means it trades up against anything all game, but the sharper design here is how power-up prices its second mode. The activation is steep enough that it rarely fires the turn this arrives at full cost, yet the parenthetical discount for playing it fresh is exactly the lever that makes sequencing matter: a same-turn deploy reduces the cost by this creature's own mana cost of , dropping the activation to a bare and turning a would-be five-mana hand-attack-and-grow into something you can pay in the same window. The one-time-only clause is the restriction doing the real work; each copy gets a single opponent-hitting discard and a single counter, which makes this a one-shot pressure valve stapled to an attacker that already threatens combat rather than a recurring disruption engine. The counter it leaves behind matters more for what it protects than for the size bump: a 3/3 deathtoucher is a nastier block to walk into than the 2/2 it started as, and the extra toughness lifts it past the reach of cheap point removal that would have answered it small. What it reaches for is a black threat that carries its own attrition, stripping a card from every opponent's hand while growing sturdier on board. The deathtouch keeps it relevant defensively in the turns before you can afford the activation, so the two abilities cover opposite ends of the same creature's life: a menacing early blocker that later converts into tempo and a discard without ever leaving play.