Leeches

Read the card as what it actually is and the design reveals itself: a cure that bills you for the poison it removes. The math is friendlier than the brutality of the wording suggests, because poison and life run on different scales. Poison kills at ten while life starts at twenty, so converting counters to damage point-for-point is a good trade whenever your life total has room. A player at twenty staring down eight poison can wipe the counters and walk away at twelve, well clear of either death clock. The conversion only turns sour once your life is already low enough that the incoming damage finishes the job the poison would have. The deeper problem is the set it shipped into, which gave poison almost no engine to speak of. Poison was a fringe mechanic here, attached to a handful of creatures nobody built around, so a sorcery whose entire function is removing poison counters answered a threat the format never actually produced. Printed more than a decade before infect and toxic gave poison a real framework, it cannot even be reframed as forward-looking hate. What endures is the artifact quality: a snapshot of a set built around mechanics the design team would largely walk away from, where an answer could be costed and aimed at a question the format had no means to ask.