Torment

A defensive Aura built on a single insight: you do not have to kill an attacker to neutralize it. Shaving three power off a creature while leaving its toughness untouched turns a clock into a non-threat, blanks a beater for the price of a removal spell, and does it permanently as long as the Aura sticks. The trade Wizards asks for is the Aura's structural weakness: card disadvantage on a two-for-one if the creature dies anyway, and a permanent that does nothing on an empty board. The -3/-0 line is also a deliberately blunt instrument compared to the -X/-X effects black would later lean on; it cannot finish a wounded creature, it cannot answer a token swarm, and it leaves the body on the battlefield to chump or carry an equipment. What it does cleanly is buy time against a focused beatdown plan, which makes it a card of its era, when black's answers to combat were narrower and an enchantment that simply made the biggest threat harmless had a real place. The design predates the wide-targeting, instant-speed removal that came to define the color, and reads now as a snapshot of a moment when permanent, conditional answers were still how black handled a board.