Duelist of Deep Faith

The conditional first strike is the piece worth studying here. Toxic wants to connect, and a 2/2 that trades poison for combat damage lives or dies on whether it can attack profitably. Handing it first strike only during your turn resolves that tension precisely: on the swing, it kills a 2/2 blocker before taking a scratch, so the aggressor's combat math always favors pushing forward. But notice the boundary of what that buys. Without trample, a blocked attacker deals no damage to the player and delivers no poison counter, so first strike is not a shortcut to a clock; it is insurance that keeps the body alive through the crackback and preserves it for the next swing at an open board. Flip to the defensive turn and the first strike vanishes, leaving an ordinary 2/2 that any attacker can trade into. The asymmetry is the design: this creature is the aggressor's tool, not the blocker's, which is exactly the posture a poison deck wants from its two-drop. Toxic's slow arithmetic (one counter at a time, ten to close) rewards a body that survives to attack repeatedly rather than one that stalls the ground, and turn-locked first strike biases the creature toward the attack step without stapling on evasion or a fatter butt. It reads more modest than it plays, but only when the arrow points forward.