The Serpent Society

Ward that demands poison counters is a rare thing, and here it does double duty as both a defensive tax and a clock: the five counters an opponent pays to touch this creature are half the ten that end their game, so protecting it and progressing a poison win become the same action. That reframes what removal costs. In most decks you spend life or mana to interact; against this, you pay toward your own death, which makes the deterrent scale with how far along the infect plan already is. The body is built to enable the payoff rather than deliver it. Deathtouch on a 3/4 is a fair-fight discourager, but the sacrifice trigger keys off other deathtouch creatures dying, turning every chump block, every trade, every sacrifice outlet into forced attrition on the opponent's board. It rewards a swarm of small deathtouch bodies, the kind that trade up and then, in dying, strip a nontoken creature from across the table. The design welds two black-green attrition engines that usually live apart: poison as an alternate win, and deathtouch-as-removal as a grind tool. The seam between them is what makes the card cohere: the counter an opponent spends to kill it funds the very poison win it protects, while the other deathtouch creatures it fields do the actual killing that feeds the sacrifice engine. Every axis points the same direction.