Skeleton Archer
A 3/3 for four is under rate on the body alone, but the body was never the point: the design pays for the below-curve stats by stapling one damage to the arrival. That free point does quiet structural work. It picks off an X/1, finishes a creature already down to its last toughness in combat, or goes to the face when nothing on board is worth shooting. That damage sits on the stack like any other trigger, so a canny opponent can still fizzle it by giving the target protection or sacrificing a chump before it resolves; but that response costs them a card or a creature, and the sniping player already banked the trade they wanted. The 3/3 is incidental insurance after that: send it into the red zone and the point of damage is already spent on the way in. This is the template black has long leaned on for the value creature that refuses to be a dead draw, the same lineage as the modest flier or token-maker that comes with something bolted on so the card is never a blank. What separates this one is that the bolted-on effect is removal-adjacent, letting an otherwise vanilla-grade midrange body double as a way to clear a blocker or chip an opponent down. The ceiling is deliberately low; the floor is the whole pitch.






