Archfiend's Vessel

A one-drop whose payoff is written into its own death: it wants to be discarded, not deployed. Cast from hand, it resolves as a 1/1 lifelink body and nothing else, the token clause pointedly inert because the trigger only fires when the card enters from your graveyard or is cast from there. That inversion is the whole design. Most reanimation targets are expensive things you cheat past their cost; this is the cheapest possible creature that upgrades any graveyard-recursion effect, no matter how small, into a 5/5 flier. Unearth returns it for a single black mana and hands you a Demon on the spot. Any spell that puts a creature card from the yard onto the battlefield, or lets you cast one from there, converts the return from a 1/1 into a flying finisher. The exile-on-trigger is the balancing hinge: the Vessel eats itself to mint the token, so the conversion happens once and leaves nothing behind to loop. Pitching it early and reanimating it late is the intended sequence, which makes the lifelink faintly ironic; you are rarely swinging with the 1/1, you are feeding it to the graveyard as fast as you can. It belongs to a small family of cards that reward the discard as much as the cast, where the fair front half buys access to the broken back half.