Blackcleave Goblin

Four mana for a 2/1 is a deliberately ungenerous rate, and that is the point: the body is a delivery vehicle for the only number that matters, the two poison counters it lands the turn it arrives. Haste collapses the clock for a creature whose whole job is to chip at the ten-poison threshold rather than the twenty-life one. The infect math reframes the stats: two damage that becomes two poison is two-tenths of an alternate win condition delivered immediately, before a blocker can be developed, and it cannot be healed away the way burned life can. Speed is the tradeoff for the toughness, which is almost an afterthought; a creature this fragile was never meant to survive past the swing it was printed to make. The Phyrexian Goblin Zombie line marks it as a foot soldier of the corruption mechanic that turns combat damage into an accumulating debt rather than a recoverable wound. This is the unglamorous middle of the infect curve: no evasion, no protection, just a hasty body that pushes the poison total forward one turn faster than a vanilla creature could, paid for by a stat line bad enough that nothing else about it competes for the slot.