Cyclopean Mummy

Exile-on-death is the load-bearing line, and it tells you exactly what this card was built to shut off. In 1994, recursion was the emerging shape of black's late game: Animate Dead in print, a graveyard that functioned as a second hand for anyone willing to pay the life or the mana. A 2/1 for two in black was already an aggressive rate for the era; pricing it that way and then exiling it on death is the designer admitting that the body would be a reanimation target the moment it reached the bin. The downside is structural, not situational: you cannot get it back, your opponent cannot reanimate it, no later graveyard-recursion line touches it. The triggered ability that exiles it is not a drawback bolted onto a plain beater, it is the price of the discount, written into the card so the loop seals itself. The rate is no longer special, and the exile clause forecloses precisely the interactions that would make a small black creature interesting, so its competitive life is firmly behind it. But as a study in how early black was costed against its own graveyard, it is unusually honest: the discount is real, the trigger is the toll, and the card tells you exactly what you are paying for it.