Murk Dwellers

An early stab at the design problem that combat-damage tricks would later solve more elegantly: how do you reward the attacker for getting through without making the creature a blank when it doesn't? This one punishes inaction. The defender who declines to block hands over a 4/2 worth of damage; the defender who blocks faces a 2/2 that the trample-less attacker can simply trade away. That fork is the whole card, and it is a coarser version of the menace-and-evasion logic that later sets would build entire archetypes around. The pump only fires on the unblocked attack, so a blocked swing and a defensive turn both leave the base 2/2 untouched, which keeps the stat line honest at a price that reflects mid-nineties creature math rather than anything resembling modern rates. As a Zombie it predates tribal payoffs by years, so the type line was flavor before it was function. What makes the design worth a second look is the decision it forces onto the opponent rather than the controller: the attacker commits, and the blocker chooses which kind of bad outcome to accept. That is a cleaner piece of combat theory than the four-mana 2/2 frame suggests, even if the rate never made it more than a curiosity.