Weakness

A first-set artifact of when Aura-based creature removal was treated as a legitimate design axis rather than a trap. The math is honest: one black mana to shrink a creature by three total points, enough to kill a one-toughness body outright or to swing most combat trades in your favor, but routed through the permanent-based removal that black would spend the next decade walking away from. The structural problem is the one every targeted Aura inherits: you commit a permanent to neutralizing a creature, your opponent commits nothing to replacing it, and if the creature leaves the battlefield your Aura goes with it for no value. Dead Weight eventually addressed the same brief more efficiently (a -2/-2 Aura that just kills two-toughness creatures outright), but it inherits the same chassis flaw, which is why black ultimately leaned on its kill spells and on counter-based shrink rather than on Auras at all. What remains worth reading here is the era it documents: a moment when black's removal suite was being sketched out in real time, with Terror handling the kills, Drain Life handling the reach, and the Aura slot left for incremental shrink effects that nobody had yet realized would age badly. The rate is fine. The chassis is the problem, and that lesson is most of what the card is now worth reading for.