Disease Carriers

Forget the 2/2; the value is entirely in the dying. Whenever this Rat dies, something shrinks on the way out, which makes it a creature you actively want to lose: chump-block a fattie and the swing leaves the attacker -2/-2 anyway, or sacrifice it freely and convert the trigger into a delayed removal spell. That structure is the whole design. The stats are deliberately forgettable so the value lives in the leaving-play moment, not the staying-in-play one. The -2/-2 reads as a combat afterthought, but it kills X/2s outright and turns favorable blocks into double-kills, so the cost of the effect is timing: you have to engineer the death rather than fire the spell on demand. This is the black tradition of bodies that pay you to die, the pattern that runs from small sacrificial deathtouchers like Festering Goblin to the aristocrat fodder that defines so many later black decks: creatures whose best turn is their last. Disease Carriers is an unflashy early entry in that line, a Rat whose entire purpose is to be spent.