Street Wraith

The body is a decoy. Almost nobody who runs this card intends to cast it: the swampwalking 3/4 exists so the cycling clause has a creature stapled to it, and the cycling is the entire point. Paying two life to draw a card is the cheapest cycling cost ever printed, a free deck-thinning trick that lets fast decks treat the slot as "draw a card now, or block with a wraith in the rare game that goes long." That life-for-tempo trade is the math aggressive and combo shells are glad to make: shaving two life off a clock that wins before the life total matters is functionally free, and cycling swaps a card that would otherwise rot as a dead late-game body for a guaranteed early dig. The design is a quiet acknowledgment that a creature's mana cost and its usefulness can be entirely divorced; the printed five-mana line is a number the card hopes you never read. What makes it a recurring fixture is consistency: a deck can trade a handful of its real cards for these to smooth its draws without diluting its threat density, because each copy is a free swap toward whatever it actually needs that turn. The swampwalk is flavor and the rare bonus; the cycling is the contract.