Smoldering Butcher

Wither rewrites the economics of blocking. Every point of combat damage this 4/2 deals arrives as a -1/-1 counter, so trading into it is never clean: a blocker that survives walks away permanently shrunk, and a blocker the attack overwhelms dies carrying those counters rather than soaking a clean lump of damage. The body reads less as power and toughness than as four removal-sized counters to be distributed however combat falls, which turns its low toughness into a secondary concern next to the choice it forces: eat four damage off the top, or accept a creature maimed for the rest of the game. The fragility funds the math. At 4/2 it folds to nearly any block or burn spell and rarely survives to swing twice, which is the brake that keeps the wither beating from snowballing. Read alone, it is a glass cannon built to make combat miserable. Read as a counter source, it slots into a larger lineage: wither and infect both convert combat damage into -1/-1 counters as a resource, and proliferate effects multiply whatever this attacker scatters across a board. That same counter-laying is also why it answers persist permanently: a persist creature killed by wither damage dies with -1/-1 counters already on it, and those counters cancel the persist trigger before it can fire, so the creature stays dead instead of returning a size smaller. The card's whole value lives in that conversion of damage into permanent subtraction.