Contagious Nim

Five connections to ten poison, and not a point of it ever washes off: that permanence is the whole reason a body this plain earns a slot in a dedicated infect shell. Two poison per swing makes for a slow clock on paper, but it is a clock the opponent cannot answer by gaining life or trading blows, because ordinary damage races simply do not apply to a player you are killing with counters instead of life loss. Chump blocking buys a single turn at a time, nothing more. On defense the same mechanic flips into a deterrent: anything that attacks into it eats -1/-1 counters in combat, and those counters do not evaporate at end of turn the way combat damage does, so a creature that survives the trade walks away permanently shrunk. With no evasion and no built-in pump, it leans entirely on the deck around it to push the last few counters past blockers, which is why this kind of creature reads as a payoff for a committed poison build rather than a standalone threat. The Phyrexian Zombie typing places it in the era's compleated-Mirrodin flavor, a foot soldier in the slow corruption of a plane, but mechanically it is the plainest possible statement of the infect promise: a creature whose every mark on the board, on bodies or on players, is written in counters and never erased at cleanup like the damage everything else deals.