Ophiomancer

The conditional is the whole engine: a token appears only when you control no Snakes, which turns a free 1/1 deathtouch every upkeep into a reusable sacrifice resource that quietly refills as long as you spend it. Because the gate checks Snakes rather than tokens, it produces exactly one at a time and pauses until that Snake leaves play, so the board never floods on its own. Feed the token to a sacrifice outlet, an Edict, or combat, and the next upkeep hands you another. Deathtouch is what makes the modest body irrelevant: a recurring 1/1 with deathtouch is a wall that trades up against any attacker, a fight-spell payload, and a removal spell on legs when paired with anything that pushes it into damage. The check triggers on each player's upkeep, not just yours, so the Snake is back in time to block whatever swings your way. Built as a slow-drip value piece for grindy black decks, it rewards a board that treats creatures as ammunition rather than threats: stop sacrificing the Snake and the engine idles, holding a single deathtouch blocker until you decide to spend it again. The self-throttling is baked into the trigger itself, which is why the card never spirals: it only ever gives back what you have already consumed.