Plague Fiend

Deathtouch, the keyword, would not arrive for years; this is what an early-era designer built when they wanted a creature to kill what it fought but still wanted to charge a toll for the privilege. The combat damage trigger sets up an ultimatum: connect with another creature, and its controller either pays two mana or watches it die. That tax is what separates the effect from deathtouch entirely, and it cuts both ways. Against an opponent holding mana up, the trade becomes a ransom rather than a kill; against a tapped-out board, anything that blocks or gets blocked is suddenly hostage to the toll. Handing the opponent the decision about what each threatened creature is worth means the design punishes the bodies no one wants to spend mana saving and lets the crucial ones live at a cost. The fragile 1/1 frame is the counterweight: the trigger only fires when this thing actually deals combat damage to a creature, so it has to attack into a blocker or block one itself, and against a defender its size or larger it can still push its single point through and force the choice even as it dies in the exchange. Anything that stops that damage from landing—first strike that kills it first, damage prevention, protection, or removal before the damage step—strips the trigger outright. A small, fiddly piece of attrition from a period when this kind of conditional combat removal was still being prototyped one creature at a time.