Bloodrage Vampire

A 3/1 for three mana is already a body the aggressive black deck is happy to run: enough power to trade up or pressure planeswalkers, fragile enough that the cost stays honest. Bloodthirst is the reward for being ahead rather than the engine that gets you there. If you have already connected, this enters as a 4/2, a meaningful jump that turns a fine attacker into one that demands a block or a removal spell. The mechanic's quiet constraint is sequencing: the ability checks only whether an opponent took damage earlier in the turn, so the counter rewards committing your creature after combat or after a burn spell has landed, and punishes the player who deploys it before any damage has gone in. That tension (play it early as a vanilla beater, or hold it to land bigger) is the whole decision the card asks for, and it scales with a curve built to apply damage first. It is filler in any deck that cannot reliably attack on the turn it casts, and a genuine tempo gain in one built to. Bloodthirst as a keyword was always tuned to this kind of low-rarity aggro support, designed to make racing decks press harder when they are winning rather than to rescue them when they are behind.