Ashcloud Phoenix

A four-power flyer on a one-toughness frame is the kind of liability that usually demands a fragile, all-in deck, and the recursion clause is the answer the design writes for its own glass body: when it dies, it returns face down, a 2/2 you can flip again. The morph cost is steep, but turning it face up does two things at once: it restores the 4/1 flyer and pings both players for two, so the same card can chip an opponent down across multiple deaths while also threatening to chew through your own life total. The phoenix lineage is built around death-as-engine rather than death-as-finality, and this one mechanizes it through morph rather than a graveyard-cast trigger: a creature that died once returns ready to flip and burn again, which makes it stubborn against single-target removal in a way the raw stats hide. A burn spell or an edict spends a card to leave you with a 2/2 you can rebuild into the same threat. The catch lives in the same trigger that powers it: the face-up damage hits you as hard as it hits them, so every flip is two life off your own total. That self-inflicted clock is the restraint that keeps a card this resilient honest. The recursion does still route through the graveyard, though, so a death-replacement effect that exiles instead of letting creatures die switches the engine off entirely.