Stronghold Confessor

Kicker exists to give a card two honest jobs at two different points in a game, and this Cleric splits those jobs cleanly across the curve. Spend a single black mana and it is a one-drop with menace, an evasive body that demands two blockers and trades up against decks that left their early defense thin. Hold it into the late game, pay the additional cost, and the same card arrives as a 3/3 with menace: a finisher that no longer cares whether the opponent has stabilized the ground, because a pair of blockers is exactly what most boards stop being able to spare by then. The two +1/+1 counters that come with the kicked version are the honest cost of that flexibility; they are what a full four mana buys, and nothing about how the extra size arrives makes it larger than a plain 3/3 would be. What holds the flexibility in check is the floor. Cast unkicked, it stays a fragile 1/1 that trades down to anything after the early turns. Cast kicked, you have committed four mana to a 3/3, a mana sink that pays off precisely when you are drawing off the top and want more than a spent one-drop from your draw step. That tension between the two casts is the entire design: a creature whose size tracks the resources you happen to have, its mode decided in the moment rather than fixed on the deckbuilding page.