Serpent Generator

Poison's first artifact engine. Before infect collapsed the mechanic into a keyword on creatures, poison counters were a slow, accumulating alternative win condition, and this is the card that tried to make them a strategy rather than a curiosity. The structure is unusually patient for its era: pay six to deploy, then sink four mana and an activation into manufacturing a 1/1 that still has to connect with a player to do its job. Ten connections is the theoretical clock, and nothing about the card hides that math. What it does offer is inevitability of a kind rarely committed to print at the time: an artifact that cannot be killed by creature removal, producing creatures that cannot be killed by enchantment removal, carrying a counter type that little in its era could remove. The rate is brutal, the loop is slow, and every part of the engine is gated behind mana you have to keep finding round after round. Later poison designs (the infect cycle, the Phyrexian Praetors and their kin) all sit downstream of the basic question this card asked first: what does it look like to win the game one counter at a time, and how much mana is that worth?