Infectious Horror

Four mana for a 2/2 whose attack trigger does not even need the creature to connect: that is the whole bet, and it is a bet that only pays off when there is more than one opponent to point at. Against a single life total, a 2/2 that lops two off the table each time it declares an attack is a glacial clock and a fragile body to keep alive for it, easily traded down or simply blocked into irrelevance. The trigger is what saves it from that math, because it scales with the number of players rather than the size of the swing. In a multiplayer pod, one attack step taxes everyone at once, and the life loss lands whether or not the creature survives combat or gets through a blocker. The design is therefore asking a sideways question: not how hard you hit any one opponent, but how many opponents you can make pay simultaneously. The body stays small and disposable; the value lives entirely in the breadth of the table. It is not life gain for you, just a small, repeatable bleed against everyone else, which is exactly why it reads as filler in a duel and as a quiet attrition piece when the seats around the table fill up.