The Fallen

The memory clause is the whole point, and it was wildly ambitious for 1994: this 2/3 has to track which opponents and planeswalkers it has connected with across the entire game, then ping each of them for 1 at the beginning of your upkeep for the rest of the game. The trigger only cares about damage dealt to opponents and planeswalkers, so blocking (which deals damage to the attacking creature, not to a player) never feeds the engine. The only way to start the bleed is to land a hit. Once a player has been bloodied, that player keeps taking 1 each of your turns whether the creature ever attacks again or not, which reframes the body as a fragile permanent clock rather than a beater. The triple-black cost and the modest stat line are the brakes: the card wants to live long enough for the cumulative pings to matter, but it dies to almost any removal and loses combat to anything serious, so the engine rarely gets to run. It belongs to the strain of black design that asks you to invest in inevitability rather than tempo, an idea later black creatures would execute on bodies built to survive the investment. The Fallen is the rough draft of that idea: a creature whose value lives entirely in the games it survives, attached to a body that struggles to survive them.