Send in the Pest

Two-mana black spells that staple two effects together usually charge for the stapling with a downside somewhere: a random discard, a body that can't block, a life cost buried in the fine print. This one does both jobs cleanly. The discard is the opponent's-choice kind (each opponent picks what to pitch), so it shaves a card off their plan rather than working as a scalpel you aim, and it does nothing against an empty hand. The token is where the design points itself. A Pest is a creature type built as fodder, but the on-attack lifegain rider tugs against that: a die-trigger would reward sacrificing it, while this rewards keeping the 1/1 alive and swinging, so the card is quietly asking you to send the token into combat rather than feed it to a sacrifice outlet. That tension is the whole read. A discard-plus-token sorcery looks like generic value, and the value is real, but the two halves live on different axes: the discard is front-loaded disruption that wants to land early, while the token wants to survive and keep attacking to justify the lifegain. The body does not replace itself as a card, so the disruption carries the slot on the cast; the Pest is a slow annuity you collect each time it swings. A two-drop that bites while the disruption still matters and keeps trickling once the board stabilizes.