Impaler Shrike

The 3/1 flying body is the entire transaction here: it has to connect once, and then it has to die. The design hands you a steep payout (three cards, the same haul a Concentrate or Tidings buys) but charges for it in evasion damage rather than mana, and the toughness of 1 makes that single connection genuinely fragile. Anything that touches it before combat damage resolves, a blocker it can be chumped by, a point of reach, an instant-speed bounce, voids the whole exchange. What makes the sacrifice clause more than a drawback is the timing window: you draw the three cards as a may, after damage, so you can read the board and the rest of your hand before deciding whether to cash in or keep a flier on the table. It is a recurring archetype of evasive blue creature that pays you for combat math rather than raw stats, a lineage that runs through cards like Ophidian and Thieving Magpie, except those drew incrementally and stuck around. This one front-loads everything into one swing and then walks off the battlefield, trading board presence for a fistful of cards. The Phyrexian-bird framing is appropriate: it is a single-use delivery system, a creature built to be spent rather than developed.