Lost Leonin

The clock the whole poison-aggro shell was built to enable. Two mana for a 2/1 with infect means an unblocked hit puts two poison on the opponent, one-fifth of the way to a ten-counter kill, and that small per-hit number is exactly why the deck never relied on the body alone. Infect collapses the win condition from twenty life down to ten poison, so the creatures carrying it do not need to be big; they need to be cheap, evasive enough to connect, and backed by a stack of pump spells that turn each connection into a multiple-counter swing. A single Giant Growth on this body is suddenly five poison, half a kill, and a couple of those plus a Mutagenic Growth or a proliferate effect finishes the game well before a life-total deck registers the threat. The 2/1 is deliberately fragile: it dies to almost anything, which is the price of pricing it this low, but it forces the opponent to spend removal on turn two or eat damage that compounds toward a number they cannot easily claw back. Unglamorous and load-bearing, it is not the payoff and not the haymaker, just the early body that makes the curve work and demands an answer to a threat that only ever needs to connect a few more times.