Vampiric Embrace

The +1/+1 counter clause is the part designers kept reaching for and rarely got right. Most evasion auras stop at the stat boost and the keyword: bigger creature, harder to block, done. This one bolts a reward loop onto combat lethality, turning every favorable block or chump into permanent growth. The clause is carefully scoped, though: the counter only lands when a creature dealt damage by the enchanted body actually dies that turn, so kills where the enchanted creature survives feed it while a creature merely chipped for two does not. That makes the aura a snowball engine rather than a flat buff, with one structural irony built in. The flying is the part that fights its own counter clause. Evasion reduces the pool of legal blockers, and the most common outcome of a flying attacker is that nobody blocks at all, which means no creature dies and no counter accrues. The growth comes from the games where the defender does choose to block and loses something to it: gang blocks, desperate chumps, races where the opponent has to trade up. So the aura snowballs most against a defending board that cannot afford to let it connect, and grows least when it simply flies over for damage. The cost is the one auras always pay: four mana committed to a single body that two-for-ones you the moment it eats removal. That tension, a growing threat versus a fragile one, is the whole design, and it rewards a creature that already survives combat far more than the rate alone suggests.