Deadly Insect

The original glass cannon dressed in protection that doesn't quite protect what matters. At five mana for a 6/1, the body is a single damage point away from dying to anything that touches it: a stray ping, a blocker, a combat trick on the other side. Shroud answers exactly one of those threats. It walls off targeted removal, the spells that would name this creature and burn it or bounce it or shrink it, but it does nothing about the board itself. A 1/1 blocker trades. A sweeper takes it. A single point of damage from any untargeted source ends it. The design lays bare how shroud actually works as a keyword: it is a hex against the stack, not against the battlefield, and a one-toughness creature lives and dies almost entirely on the battlefield. The 6/1 frame turns that distinction into a teaching tool. You are buying immunity to the removal column of an opponent's deck while leaving the combat column wide open, which is a real but narrow bargain. With no haste, it has to survive a full turn cycle before it can ever attack, and every one of those turns is borrowed against a coin flip that any incidental damage resolves against you. The shroud that makes it look durable is precisely the keyword that cannot protect a one-toughness body from the thing most likely to kill it.