Slaughter Drone

Deathtouch on a stick is nothing new, but pricing the grant in rather than any old swamp turns an ordinary 2/2 into a litmus test for how you built your manabase. The in the casting cost keeps the drone black for color-identity purposes even though devoid strips its frame and text box of color; the move worth attention is the toll. Because colorless mana comes only from specific lands and rocks, the deathtouch is live only if you actually committed to an Eldrazi-flavored manabase instead of splashing black for the body. Pay the toll and it trades up against anything in combat or eats an attacker on the way in; fail to find a colorless source and the ability sits inert on a two-power body that still has to attack and block like any other creature. That gap between a generically priced creature and a parasitically priced ability is what let a wave of -activated drones cohere as a mechanical subtheme rather than a pile of unrelated commons. The grant is instant-speed, too, so a visibly online colorless source keeps the threat alive through combat: an opponent has to read every block as potentially lethal, and the bluff evaporates the moment no colorless mana is available. It is a clean expression of an early experiment in treating colorless mana as a deckbuilding cost rather than a free resource.