Ruthless Sniper

Discard is usually a cost you swallow: a downside attached to a rummage effect, a casualty of a hand-size check, the price of a powerful enabler. This turns the act of getting rid of a card into a repeatable removal engine. Each time you cycle or pitch something, you get the option to spend an extra mana and shave a creature's toughness, and over a few turns those -1/-1 counters add up to dead blockers, neutered combat tricks, and shrunken threats without ever spending a card on it. The body is incidental; the value is in stapling a payoff to discard, which most decks treat as friction rather than fuel. The counter mechanic matters here too: -1/-1 counters are permanent reductions, so the damage doesn't reset between turns the way combat damage or a temporary debuff would, and they stack toward outright killing something the more triggers you chain together. That structural trade (converting card disadvantage into board advantage) is the same one madness and flashback enablers make from the other direction, black rewarding a hand-churning, graveyard-feeding strategy by paying you for the cards you throw away. On its own it does little; given a deck built to discard on purpose, it quietly grinds a board down one toughness at a time.