Annex Sentry
Fold the removal and the blocker into one body, and the math starts to make sense. The enter-the-battlefield exile is the familiar Oblivion Ring shape stapled to a creature, but the mana-value-3-or-less clamp is doing deliberate work: it caps the answer at the cheap end of the curve, where the artifacts and small threats it wants to neutralize actually live, and keeps it from swallowing the game's real payoffs. What it exiles comes back if the Sentry dies, so the 1/4 body is not incidental. That toughness is the point: it turns a temporary answer into a durable one by making the creature hard to kill in combat, which is precisely how you keep the exiled permanent locked away. A 1/4 sits comfortably in front of an attacking board, and every turn it survives is another turn the exiled permanent stays gone. Toxic 1 is the offensive counterweight to all that defense. One power is a miserable clock in damage, but poison counts on a separate track, so when the Sentry does swing through, it advances a loss condition that ignores life total entirely. That split matters: the card is built to hold ground with its toughness and threaten through a mechanic its low power cannot dilute. The result reads passive and plays as attrition, three jobs priced together, each covering for the weakness of the others.

