Starke of Rath

Removal you rent rather than own. Tapping him buys you a kill, but the default cost is handing the very 2/2 that did the killing to the player whose permanent it just destroyed, weapon and all. That drawback is not incidental: it is the entire mechanism. Each player taps Starke to clear the other's board, then surrenders the assassin, so the card pinballs across the table in a slow back-and-forth that neither side ever fully commands. The Tempest story models this almost too literally: Starke was a turncoat in Volrath's service, a man whose loyalty was always for sale, and the rules text translates that betrayal into board control with unusual fidelity. The interesting wrinkle is the off-ramps the activation leaves open. Because the control change waits on the ability resolving, you can respond to your own activation by bouncing or sacrificing Starke: the destruction still happens, but the hand-off has no creature left to grab and fizzles. You can also simply aim the tap at one of your own permanents, killing something you wanted gone and keeping Starke on your side by default. Used straight against an opponent, though, he drifts back into their hands on every activation, which is a strange thing to ask of removal and exactly why he reads more as a piece of narrative engineering than a tournament fixture.