Coat with Venom

The combat-trick-as-removal has a long lineage, and this is a clean expression of it: for a single black mana at instant speed, you turn any creature into a fight-winning blocker or a threat nobody wants to attack into. Deathtouch is the load-bearing part; the +1/+2 is almost incidental, a small nudge to help the buffed creature survive the exchange it just won. The structural appeal is that you are not paying for a removal spell, you are paying for the option of one. Hold it, untapped mana visible, and the opponent has to assume any blocker or attacker is a death sentence to whatever it touches, which is enough to freeze an attack step or bait a bad block. Black has always priced this kind of effect cheaply because deathtouch on demand is parasitic on the board state: it does nothing without a creature to wear it, and nothing against an empty board. The math is honest about what it buys you. Used to kill an opposing creature while keeping your own alive, it is a clean one-for-one: you spend the card, they lose a creature. The toughness bump is what tilts that line in your favor, since an extra point is often the difference between your creature dying alongside theirs and walking away to fight again. A humble card, built for grindy creature mirrors where the credible threat of a cheap, deathtouch-granting trick distorts how both players approach combat.