Radioactive Man

Combat damage that halves a life total is a rate that scales in reverse: devastating against a full life total, negligible against a player already scraping the floor. The halving compounds the three combat damage rather than replacing it, so a connection strips three points plus half of whatever remains, biting hardest early when the percentage cuts into a large number and shrinking as totals collapse. Deathtouch is what makes a mediocre 3/5 body worth swinging with: any blocker sent to stop it trades away for a deathtouch kill, and the cost of that trade is often steep enough that opponents wave the attacker through. That logic only holds when there is nothing better to throw in front, though, and the halving trigger fires only on damage to a player, not to a blocker. Without trample, a chump block stops the swing cold: no damage reaches the player, no halving occurs, and the deathtoucher merely kills a token the defender was glad to spend. So the card is a setup piece more than a closer, an attacker built for the arithmetic of a large starting total rather than the single-digit endgame, where a fraction of a small number is a small number. Point it at an open opponent early, compress a healthy total into burn range, and let the rest of your damage sources finish what the halving started.