Alesha, Who Smiles at Death

The reanimation engine that lives in the attack step. Most recursion happens at sorcery speed and asks you to pay full freight: cast the spell, then deploy the body and wait out its summoning sickness. Alesha folds the whole sequence into a combat trigger that fires the moment she is declared as an attacker, so the creature she returns arrives tapped and attacking the same turn, having skipped both the recast and the wait. The trigger fires on her very first attack, not on combat damage, which means even a chump-block does not deny you the body. The payment is the cost that keeps the loop honest: recursion here is repeatable but never free, and you are funneling Mardu mana into the engine each combat. That hybrid cost is also why her color identity is Mardu rather than red alone; the deck around her wants white removal and black graveyard fuel to feed the attacks. The power-2-or-less clamp is the other restriction, and it defines the archetype she anchors. She is not hauling fatties out of the yard; she is rebuilding a board of small, high-impact bodies whose value lives in their enter-the-battlefield or death triggers rather than their stats: blink targets, sacrifice fodder, hatebears, anything whose two-power frame undersells its text. First strike on a 3/2 is the quiet detail that lets her survive the swing and keep coming back to do it again.