Pharika's Chosen

The cheapest possible deterrent: one black mana buys a body that trades up against anything that walks into it. Deathtouch on a 1/1 turns the creature into a soft tax on every attack, since any block it makes threatens the biggest thing on the other side of the board, and the math of attacking shifts once a one-drop can eat a dragon in combat. The body itself is beside the point; nobody plays this for the 1/1. What it sells is the keyword stapled to the smallest legal price tag, which makes it a fixed point for any strategy that wants to convert tiny creatures into removal: a backline blocker that polices ground stalls, a chump that punishes whatever swings into it, or the deathtouch carrier for equipment and "bite" effects that let the creature itself deal a single point of combat or ability damage (once the source has deathtouch, any amount is lethal). The Snake type is a vestige of the underworld flavor it was cut from rather than a tribal hook. It sits in the long line of cheap deathtouch bodies that exist to make combat asymmetrical, where the deterrent value of "anything you trade with me dies" outweighs the meager stats: a creature nobody wants to attack into, doing more work standing still than swinging.