Nezumi Linkbreaker

A one-drop built on the premise that the rat is worth more dead than alive. Pay a single black mana for a fragile body, and its death converts into a Mercenary token that grants a repeatable +1/+0 pump. That pump can only fire on your own turn, which grounds the engine: the token cannot ambush a blocker mid-combat or shove through surprise damage, so every activation is a planned edit to a board you already control rather than a combat trick. The strategic axis this creates is inverted from the usual fragile one-drop, because you often want the front half to die. Sacrifice outlets, favorable trades, and profitable blocks all cash the 1/1 in for its more useful successor, so a removal spell that merely kills it hands you the token you were after; only exile or a bounce ahead of the death trigger actually answers the card cleanly. What results is a self-replacing aggressive piece, cheap enough to open a curve and sticky enough to leave something behind, with the trailing Mercenary quietly reshaping a wide board into a slightly narrower, slightly meaner one. Low-rarity aggressive glue, designed so that a warlock's usefulness outlasts the warlock.