Nirkana Cutthroat

The deathtouch-plus-first-strike pairing is one of the cleanest two-keyword interactions the game has: first strike lands the lethal touch before the blocker can answer, so any creature that meets this one in combat dies while it walks away. Level Up is what makes that combination earned rather than free. The base 3/2 is a bare body with no keywords at all, a plain attacker that does nothing the cost wouldn't suggest. Deathtouch arrives at the first level (alongside a bump to 4/3), and the defining first-strike rider waits until level 3, after you have sunk repeated sorcery-speed payments of into the counter. That is the structural cost: every level is a turn spent paying mana instead of developing the board, and the payoff sits behind a wall of investment an opponent can see coming and answer before it matures. The body never gets large (it tops out at 5/4), so this was never a card about raw size; it is about converting a slow mana sink into a permanent that wins every fight it picks. The design encodes patience as the price of inevitability, the central bargain of every Level Up creature: feed the counter in the early game, and the late game hands you a creature opponents cannot profitably block or attack into.