Spitting Hydra

The body is the battery. Entering with four +1/+1 counters and a repeatable ping that spends them, this is a Hydra that pays for its own removal in flesh: each shock fired downgrades the creature, so the player is constantly weighing a smaller body against a cleared board. That conversion rate is the whole design. At full health it is a 4/4 with four pre-loaded one-damage zaps; bleed it dry and you have a 0/0 that dies the moment the last counter leaves, since nothing else is holding it up. The friction baked in is real: every activation costs on top of the counter, so the pinging is mana-hungry, not free, and the damage only ever hits creatures, never players or planeswalkers. That makes it a deliberate attrition piece rather than a reach engine, a creature that grinds down small-creature boards one removal-equivalent at a time while its own clock shrinks. It belongs to an early line of counter-based creatures Wizards used to fold a removal spell and a body into a single permanent, trading raw efficiency for the tension of self-cannibalization. The card asks a question every turn it is in play: is the next ping worth the toughness it costs you?