Midnight Assassin

The pairing of flying and deathtouch on a small evasive body is one of the oldest tricks black has for turning a mediocre statline into a soft lock on the ground. The 1/2 will rarely win a race, but it does not have to: it patrols the skies as a creature nothing wants to block, and it makes every attack into the red zone a trade the opponent has to think hard about. Deathtouch reframes the toughness math entirely, since a defender that would normally shrug off a single point of damage instead dies to it, so this body punches through combat as though it were a removal spell that happens to have wings. That combination has been printed at various rates over the years, and this one lands squarely in the middle of the curve: cheap enough to hold the air, sturdy enough on two toughness to survive the incidental pings that would clear a one-toughness deterrent. What it lacks is any way to convert its threat into pressure faster than a point a turn, which is the ceiling black accepts in exchange for the utility. As a common-rarity role-player, it exists to make aggressive black decks harder to attack into and easier to attack with, filling the evasive-defender slot that fair midrange has always wanted from its two-power-and-under creatures.