Shelob's Ambush

Deathtouch on a combat trick has always been black's way of turning a small creature into a guillotine: hand the fang to any attacker or blocker and it trades up into anything on the board. That half of the design is old, the pump-as-removal that black has printed in various shapes for a long time. The Food token stapled on top is the newer wrinkle. The buff-and-deathtouch line is pure tempo, but the token folds the card into a second economy: a payoff for artifact-count triggers, sacrifice fodder for aristocrat engines, a life-gain trickle for grindy decks that never had a reason to run a combat trick. That grafting is the point. A pump spell alone is the card you cut when the board is stable; the Food means the spell still does something when there is nothing to ambush, hedging against the dead-card problem that keeps most tricks out of non-aggressive decks. The +1/+2 pulls double duty within its modest range: against equal or smaller creatures the extra toughness lets you eat the block outright rather than merely trade, so deathtouch is not always a one-for-one exchange. Against something genuinely large, deathtouch does the work and the buff is incidental. Two mechanics that would each headline a weaker card, priced together at a single black mana, with the Food doing the quiet labor of making the trick worth maindecking.