Sabertooth Cobra

Poison began as a tax, not a tally. Each time this Snake connects, the defending player takes a single poison counter regardless of how much damage was dealt, and the design's whole engine is the follow-up: a second counter is scheduled for that player's next upkeep unless they pay to buy it off before then. The mark is a debt the opponent can partially service rather than a wound that simply accumulates. It reframes the ten-counter loss condition as a resource drain, a toll on connection that forces the defender to spend mana or eat the extra point. The ambition is plain, to make a modest body a threat that cannot be ignored, but the math exposes the era's caution. Green of this period had almost no reliable way to force damage through, and a 2/2 invites trades long before any poison clock becomes lethal, so the toll rarely gets paid more than once or twice. Set against how the mechanic was later rebuilt (where infect and toxic make each point a permanent, untaxed step toward ten), this is the path not taken: a per-hit cost ledger instead of a pure counting mechanic. That philosophical difference, treating a wound as a serviceable debt rather than a fixed mark, is most of why the modern keywords abandoned the approach entirely.