Raffine's Silencer

The connive on entry isn't card selection with a side of stats: the size this settles on becomes ammunition for the death trigger. Discard a nonland to the entry connive and it arrives as a 2/2, priming a -2/-2 the moment it dies, so an opponent who kills it or trades in combat can still shrink a creature on the way out. Every counter it accumulates raises the ceiling of the shrink it hands out, which quietly punishes the obvious answers to a 1/1 at this cost: chump it, block it down, or point removal at it, and any of those can cost the opponent a creature in return. The restraint that keeps it fair is that the payoff only fires on death, so it does nothing against an empty board and nothing you can aim proactively at the stack. Structurally it's a small aristocrats-adjacent body carrying its own removal spell stapled to its demise, scaled by how much you were willing to feed the connive up front. Feed a sacrifice outlet instead of waiting on combat and you convert its death on your own timeline, picking the turn the -X/-X lands and choosing which of the opponent's creatures eats it. The front-half investment funds the back-half payout, and the opponent's cleanest line into the assassin becomes the same line that triggers it.