Even if you are all in on the poison counter plan, Ixhel gives you a way to play your opponent's spells so long as they have three or more counters on them
But even so, doubling counters on permanents is potentially huge, like say Planeswalkers, which work in a really funky way, and similarly this cuts your opponents counters to half, rounded down, which means in the case of 1 counter, that's 0 counters, which is in fact quite huge
The formats werent as fast in those days as they are today, so you could easily have a combo that needs more than two cards and just for value, not for the win either
To cast a wider net, these have been amalgamated with major event data from November (an SCG Open in Columbus and two Classics in Baltimore and Knoxville), which do not appear in the paper data at large