Ghastly Gloomhunter

Kicker is the mechanic that lets one card play as two different plays depending on how much you pay, and this is a clean split down that axis: a two-mana evasive lifelinker early, or a 3/3 flier carrying the same lifegain later. The 1/1 body with flying and lifelink is a fine early play in a deck that trades attacks for life padding, and the kicker cost pushes it into the midrange slot where the creature stabilizes against faster starts instead of just chipping in. The two +1/+1 counters are the payoff, and they matter beyond the raw stats: because they are physical counters rather than a static buff, the kicked body survives effects that reset base power and toughness, and it feeds anything that cares about counters on your side of the board. The design is honest because the two halves never fork the same game the way a modal spell forces a choice; you commit the kicker on the way down, so the deck has to want both the early flier and the late one. Nothing here reinvents the black evasive beater, but the counter-based scaling keeps the card relevant deeper into a game than a vanilla two-drop, and the lifelink means every point of evasive damage does double duty on the life total.