Angelic Renewal

An early ancestor in the line of recursion enchantments, and the shape it established outlasted the card itself. The engine is passive: it sits and watches your graveyard, and when a creature dies, it offers a one-time trade of itself for that creature back on the battlefield. The sacrifice is the entire price. This is not a standing engine like the cards that followed it; each return consumes the enchantment, so it answers exactly one death before you have to deploy a fresh copy. That single-use limit is also where the strategy lives. Because the trigger fires on any creature reaching your graveyard from play, the natural move is to feed it a creature with a death-relevant enter-the-battlefield effect on purpose. Add a sacrifice outlet and a way to bring the enchantment back, and you have a three-card loop that resets a creature on demand: outlet to kill the body, this to return it, and a recursion effect to reload the enchantment for next time. The two-mana cost lets it land early and wait for the right body to die into it. It reads as protection, but the way it actually gets built around is closer to a payload trigger, a quiet admission from an early-Weatherlight-era design team that returning a creature is worth more when the creature was worth killing in the first place.