Serpent Assassin

A reusable Nekrataal stapled to a Snake, balanced by a restriction black has respected since the game's first years: the destroy clause cannot touch black creatures, which protects the mirror and quietly enforces a color-pie boundary. The kill is bolted to the enters effect, so the value lives in the body returning, blinking, or being recast rather than in the creature sitting on the battlefield. A 2/2 for five does nothing on rate; the card is paying entirely for the entry trigger, which is why it has always read as a build-around piece rather than a curve-filler. Born in the simplified Portal product line, it was designed for new players who needed an obvious, splashy effect they could grasp at a glance: a creature that shows up and blows up a monster. That clarity is also what made it durable. The template ("creature enters, destroy target nonblack creature") proved clean enough that black has revisited it for decades, with Nekrataal as the better-known cousin that adds a downshifted body and incidental keyword hate. This one is the plainer statement of the same idea, and the plainness is the point: a recursion target whose entire cost is buying a removal spell you can fire again.