Twisted Experiment

Net +2 stats, rerouted through a toughness cut that black gets to charge less for than red would for raw power. That is the trade this Aura sells: take the offense you want, pay for it by shaving a point of survivability you may not need anyway. On any creature with two or more toughness it is a clean +3/-1 for two mana, a sharper boost than black usually buys at face value; on a one-toughness body the minus is lethal, and that conditional cost is what keeps the rate from being free. The downside doubles as a feature. Black has always been the color willing to spend life and bodies for tempo, and a permanent that quietly threatens to kill an undersized creature it sits on fits the color's sacrifice-and-drain logic comfortably. Because it is an Aura, it commits to the board and eats a two-for-one if the creature is removed with the Aura on the stack, which is the structural tax that separates it from an instant-speed combat trick posting the same numbers and walking away clean. A small, honest entry in black's "more damage, less safety" vocabulary, from an era when the color was still negotiating how much raw power it was allowed to staple onto a creature.