Baleful Strix

Two mana for three guaranteed pieces of value: a card off the top, a body that walls anything in the air, and a removal threat that trades up against any attacker foolish enough to swing into it. The deathtouch-plus-flying combination is the load-bearing part: a 1/1 with both keywords blocks a dragon as cleanly as a goblin and lives in the air where deathtouch is hardest to play around, so the body never feels like a 1/1 even though that is exactly what it is. The enters-the-battlefield trigger means it has already paid for itself the instant it resolves, which is the design move that makes the whole package safe to print at this rate: it cannot be a blank, and any further use is profit. That guaranteed floor is also why it has become a fixture of blink and recursion shells, where re-triggering the draw turns a defensive cantrip into an engine. As an artifact, it slots into builds that care about that type without asking for additional mana or text. The result is a card that has settled into the role of Dimir's default two-drop: not a bomb, not a finisher, but a piece that does so many small jobs competently that leaving it out of a blue-black deck requires a reason rather than a default.