Pestilent Syphoner

Toxic exists to make an evasive body matter more than its combat math suggests, and this is the leanest expression of that logic in black: a flyer whose whole purpose is to land the poison counter, not the point of damage. One power in the air would be a rounding error in a normal life-total race; against a player at nine poison it is one counter closer to an alternate lethal, and that reframing is the entire point of the keyword. The 1/1 body is fragile by design, because a resilient two-drop that also chipped toward poison would undercut the tension toxic was built around: the deck wants many small unblockable pings accumulating in parallel, not one durable threat an opponent can profitably trade into. Flying carries the counter over the ground stall that poison strategies tend to produce, which is where a two-mana beater's single toxic point actually converts. It sits in the tradition of small evasive creatures whose stats are secondary to a rider, except here the counter is a fixed, non-scaling quantity, so the card is honest about being a role-player in a wider poison plan rather than a standalone clock. Note the mechanical line between toxic and its infect predecessors: infect turned combat damage against creatures into -1/-1 counters, while toxic touches only players, leaving ordinary damage math intact everywhere else. What it represents is toxic's core promise, that connecting at all, even for one, is progress on a second victory track running underneath the normal game.