Hand of the Praetors

The lord that turns infect from a clock into a kill switch. Most poison strategies win by connecting over multiple turns, grinding an opponent to ten counters one swing at a time. This one shortens that math from two directions at once: it pumps the rest of your infect board so each unblocked hit lands harder, and it taxes the opponent for the privilege of you developing your own team, dropping a poison counter every time you cast a creature with infect. That cast trigger is the real design wrinkle, because it fires the moment the spell goes on the stack: the counter lands whether the creature ever attacks, whether it dies on the stack, even if the opponent counters it. A player who dutifully blocks and trades is still bleeding poison from your spells alone, and ten arrives faster than the board state suggests it should. The body has infect itself, so it adds its own -1/-1 counters in combat, but at 3/2 it is fragile and the anthem only catches other infect creatures, so this is a payoff that demands a deck built almost entirely around the keyword rather than a card you splash for value. That focus is the cost of the engine: outside a dedicated poison shell the anthem and the cast trigger sit idle, leaving a small attacker doing the only job left to it. Inside one, it converts a slow alternate win condition into something that can close from a board that looks survivable.