Cabal Initiate

The discard-to-lifelink line is the tell that this was built for graveyard decks that want to empty their hand anyway. In a shell that treats cards in the graveyard as a resource rather than a loss, pitching one to buy a turn of lifegain is close to free, and the threshold clause pays the same fuel back as a body worth attacking with: a 3/3 once you hit seven cards, self-improving in exactly the decks that are trying to fill the yard for other reasons. The two abilities pull in the same direction, which is what makes the design coherent rather than a pile of keywords stapled to a two-drop. Threshold itself is an old mechanic revived here, and the reason it works on this creature is that it asks for nothing the deck was not already doing. Left alone in a fair deck, it is a fragile early attacker with an activated ability you rarely want to fire. Slotted into a graveyard-matters engine, the discard becomes a way to trigger other cards while incidentally stabilizing your life total, and the threshold bonus arrives right when the graveyard is deep enough to matter. It is a support piece that reads as unremarkable in a vacuum and becomes load-bearing the moment the surrounding cards care about the same graveyard it is quietly stocking.