Reaper of Sheoldred
The 2/5 body is the whole proposition: a defensive infect creature, built to sit in front of attackers rather than race with them. Where infect is usually about pushing poison through fast (the aggressive one-drops and pump-fueled tempo of that era), this one inverts the math by punishing anyone who attacks into it. Block, and the attacker's controller takes a poison counter for the damage they dealt. Point a burn spell at it, the same thing happens. The damage-trigger turns the card into a tax on interaction: every chip of damage that hits it advances the clock against its source, so removing it can cost the remover a poison counter on the way out. That five toughness is the load-bearing number, big enough to survive most combat and a fair amount of removal long enough for the trigger to fire repeatedly. The poison-from-damage clause stacks toward the ten-counter threshold from the defensive side of the board, which is a strange place for an infect payoff to come from. It rewards a controlling posture in a mechanic otherwise married to aggression, and the friction it creates is asymmetric: the opponent has to decide whether dealing with it is worth poisoning themselves, while you lose nothing by leaving it back on defense.
