Blood Burglar

Conditional lifelink is a design compromise, and this is the clean example of it: a two-power body that drains only while you hold the initiative. The restriction to your own turn is doing quiet work. It pays for the keyword by cutting off exactly the situation where lifelink matters most defensively, blocking as a chump on the opponent's swing, so the card gains you life only when it is the aggressor. That turns a small vampire into an attrition piece for aggressive black decks rather than a stabilizing blocker, which is the archetype it was built for: it wants to be swinging, and it is paid its lifelink for doing so. As a two-drop with a keyword that is live half the time, it lives in the honest middle of the curve, common-rarity filler for tribal vampire and mono-black beatdown shells that need bodies which contribute a trickle of life against faster clocks. Nothing about it demands a build-around; the ability is a rider that makes an even trade of attacks tilt in your favor over several turns. The half-lifelink template shows up whenever designers want the incremental drain without the defensive floor that full lifelink hands to a control shell, and this is a tidy, unglamorous instance of that decision.