Vampire Spawn

The four-point life swing on entry is the whole pitch: a body that arrives already having done a Drain Life for two, then sticks around as a 2/3 to keep blocking. That swing is the kind of incidental drain that reads as filler on a single copy and adds up fast when a deck is built to flicker or recur creatures, since the trigger fires on every entry rather than once. As a stat line the 2/3 is deliberately unglamorous: it exists so the body survives long enough to matter, not to threaten damage on its own. This is the common-rarity version of the classic black creature-drain effect, the same structural work Gray Merchant of Asphodel scales up and Blood Artist splits across every death: pay a little extra mana for a creature that also nudges the life totals in your favor. Here the nudge is fixed, small, and stapled to a warm body, which makes it exactly what it was designed to be: a reliable curve-filler for any strategy that treats life totals as a resource and creature-entries as a repeatable event.