Soul Charmer

Prophecy ran an entire subtheme on a single idea: attaching a punitive rider to combat that the opponent could opt out of by paying a small tax. This sits squarely in that design, tying a two-life gain to combat damage dealt to a creature, then handing that creature's controller a two-mana buyout. The trigger itself is the tell: it fires only when the body connects with another creature, never when it swings into an empty board or hits the player, which already narrows the window to the moment when a 2/2 actually trades blows with another creature. Combat damage triggers like this resolve regardless of whether the body survives the exchange, so dying in the trade does not deny the effect; what denies it is the fork the opponent controls. They either pay two and you got a chip of their mana for nothing, or they decline and you net two life, the smallest possible upside, on a turn the combat already happened. The Rebel typing matters more than the ability: this was one of the searchable bodies in the Masques-block Rebel chain, a creature tutored up at instant speed to fill a curve slot, and in that role its text was beside the point. As a standalone card it does what so much of Prophecy's design did, which is convert a real effect into a negotiation the opponent almost always wins. The whole set treated these soft taxes as a balancing lever, and the lever sat so far toward the defender that the abilities rarely changed a thing.