Phyrexian Driver

The Mercenary tribe was Nemesis's answer to its own Rebels: a black-aligned mirror to the white tutor-chain creatures that defined the set, built on the same fetch-by-mana-value skeleton but tuned for sacrifice and aggression rather than incremental advantage. Most of the payoff lived in the chain itself; the bodies were filler. This is the rare one that asks the tribe to commit to combat. The pump fires on entry, which makes it a reward for already having a board: land it alongside three or four Mercenaries already deployed and the whole team swings a size larger for a turn. The wrinkle is timing. Because the Mercenary tutors can put a creature onto the battlefield as an activated ability, this can arrive at instant speed without itself having flash, dropping in during combat to deliver its enter-the-battlefield buff exactly when the extra point of toughness lets your attackers survive blocks they would otherwise lose. As a 1/1 it also feeds its own engine, sitting low enough on the curve that the same tutors can fetch it, which made it a sensible thing to leave near the bottom of a chain you intended to assemble anyway. The tribe never amounted to much outside its home set, and this is a clear example of why: the support was real but narrow, all of it pointing inward at a deck that had to be built almost entirely from one block's worth of cards.