Gatekeeper of Malakir

Edict effects had always asked you to pay full price up front: a sorcery's worth of mana for a creature your opponent gets to choose. The kicker structure rewrites that bargain. Unkicked, you have a 2/2 body for two black mana, a perfectly castable early play that demands nothing. Kicked, you have that same body stapled to a Diabolic Edict, a removal spell that walks onto the battlefield and keeps fighting after it has done its work. The choice lives entirely in your manabase: on turn two it is a beater, but every turn after, the third black mana converts it into two-for-one tempo against the decks that lean on a single threat. Diabolic Edict needed to resolve and then vanish; this leaves a permanent behind, which is the structural upgrade that makes the edict worth a card slot rather than a desperation answer. The sacrifice clause is still the opponent's choice, so it punishes one-creature boards and reanimator strategies far more than it punishes a wide token deck, but the body insures you against the dead draw that always haunted edict effects. That flexibility (early creature or removal-on-a-stick, chosen according to how much black mana you have open) is the whole reason a card priced like a vanilla two-drop has outlived most of its contemporaries.