Ashen Ghoul

A graveyard recursion engine that reads its own pile as a resource clock. The activation cost is trivial: one black mana brings the 3/1 back with haste. The friction lives in the condition, and it is unusual. You can only return it during your upkeep, and only when three or more creature cards sit above it in the graveyard. That ordering requirement turns the graveyard, normally a flat pool, into a stack with positional meaning, where the order creatures die determines whether the recursion is online. It also builds in a natural off-switch: each time the Ghoul returns, it leaves that buried position, so the engine asks you to keep feeding the yard creatures faster than you spend the loop. This is recursion priced on graveyard depth rather than mana or life, a balancing lever the era leaned on before delve and threshold formalized the idea of the graveyard as a countable resource. The haste matters because it answers the obvious objection to repeatable creatures: a 3/1 that returns every upkeep and attacks immediately is a clock, not just a blocker. The whole package is a self-recurring beater whose ceiling is set by how disposable the rest of your creatures are.