Scarblade's Malice

Combat pumps almost universally reward you for keeping your creature alive; this one-mana instant inverts the incentive. Deathtouch turns even the smallest body into a mutual-kill threat in the blocking step, so the opponent's combat math curdles, and lifelink pays you for the damage on the way out. But the real payload is the death clause: whatever creature you targeted leaves behind a 2/2 black and green Elf if it dies this turn, which means losing the body is no cost at all. It's a fresh token, a bigger one than most fodder you'd have thrown away, and it arrives in colors that may have nothing to do with the creature that died. That trigger reframes the whole spell. Cast it on a token or a creature you were already lining up to trade, throw it into a bigger blocker, and you come out ahead on every axis: you kill something, you gain life, and you upgrade the corpse into a 2/2. It rewards a board built to die on purpose, where creatures are fungible resources rather than investments. The tension the designers had to price is that all three effects (deathtouch, lifelink, the token) are individually modest, so the card only overperforms when the creature actually dies. There is no free value to bank by holding it up at instant speed; the payoff is conditional on the sacrifice you meant to make, and the spell is one-shot, spent the moment it resolves.