Severed Legion

Black's evasion keyword threaded a careful needle: it had to make an unremarkable body reliably connect without handing black trample or true unblockable status, both of which belong to other colors. Fear carves out exactly two exceptions (artifact creatures and other black creatures), which in most board states means the creature simply gets through. This is the rate stripped of any other ambition: a small body for three mana and a near-guaranteed two damage every turn it survives. There is no enters-the-battlefield trigger, no late-game mana sink, no graveyard wrinkle to complicate the math. That austerity is the entire proposition: evasion for its own sake, the kind of vanilla-plus common that filled black's curve in the early 2000s and gave a new player a creature whose whole job (turn sideways, deal damage, repeat) could be understood at a glance. Fear has since been functionally retired in favor of intimidate and then menace, both of which generalized the same idea to wider color combinations, so the keyword now reads as a marker of its era. On those terms, this is reasonable curve filler for a black creature deck that wants a body unlikely to be chump-blocked, and not much more.