Zombie Assassin

The removal here is gated twice over: every kill costs two cards exiled from your graveyard plus the creature itself, fed into its own ability and gone for good. This is not a repeatable engine; it is a single, deliberate trade you cash in once. What you buy with that price is unconditional within its lane: destroy target nonblack creature with no regeneration allowed, which walks straight past the regeneration shields that were still standard removal-protection when this kind of design first appeared. The graveyard cost is real rather than ceremonial, asking you to have already stocked your yard before the ability does anything, so the card belongs to a deck committed to filling its graveyard and willing to spend it. The body forces a choice rather than rewarding a double-dip, and the reason is timing. Attacking taps the creature, and the ability requires the tap symbol as part of its cost; once you have swung, the creature is tapped and cannot be activated until your next untap step. So you either attack with your 3/2 clock or you cash it in for the kill, never both in the same turn. It is slow, attrition-minded removal that asks you to time its one use carefully rather than lean on it as a reusable answer, the kind of grinding trade an early-era control or reanimator shell could afford to make when board states stalled and graveyards filled.