Squirming Mass

Two mana for a 1/1 with Fear is a vanilla evasion body, and the design pitch is exactly that small: a black creature whose entire value proposition is connecting. Fear in this era did the work that menace and shadow split between later: it priced an attacker against the assumption that most decks fielded few black or artifact blockers, so a 1/1 that would otherwise trade into anything became a creature that reliably chipped in. The trade-off is written into the body. You pay full freight for evasion and get a power that demands either pump, equipment, or sheer volume to matter. On its own it pokes for one. The point was never the stats; it was the guarantee that the one would land, turn after turn, against a board that could not interpose a chump. That is a flavor of common black has mostly retired. Modern designs that want cheap evasive aggression tend to staple it to a relevant keyword or a deathtouch wrinkle that makes the small body threaten more than its number, where this one simply asks the opponent to have the right colors of blocker and bets they will not. It reads now as a fossil of when evasion alone was considered a fair thing to sell at two mana, no rider attached, the size of the body left as the buyer's problem to solve.