Wildslayer Elves

Wither is the keyword that makes combat permanent. The damage this Elf deals to creatures arrives as -1/-1 counters, so a point it lands never washes off: clash with a 4/4 and the survivor stays shrunk, a once-larger creature whose toughness no longer resets on cleanup. That rewrites the arithmetic of blocking and attacking alike. A plain 3/3 that bounces off a bigger creature accomplishes nothing; this one carves the blocker down even as it dies in the same combat. Stacked across a board of wither attackers, a fatty can be ground to nothing over successive turns, paid for with the bodies that chip it. The design also tangles with the counter ecology of its era. Persist creatures already return marked with one -1/-1 counter; wither does not erase that residue but deepens it, piling on enough that persist never triggers a second time. The unremarkable body is the point. Wither was a counter-flavored answer to the lifelink-and-regeneration arms race of its moment, and pricing the permanence on a four-mana 3/3 rather than a cheap aggressive frame kept that permanence from spiraling. What you pay for is not the swing but the mark it leaves behind.