Aven Initiate

A common flier built to fight twice. The body is a plain evasive beater at four mana, the kind of creature that fills a curve and chips away from the air, but the flying and the embalm cost are what give it shape. Embalm is the second act, and the structure of that ability is the whole reason this design works the way it does. Once the creature dies, exiling it from the graveyard at sorcery speed makes a white Zombie token copy with no mana cost, so a single card spends itself twice across a game: once cast for blue early, once embalmed for a heftier blue activation later. The exile clause is the discipline that keeps it from becoming a recursion engine; there is no looping, no repeated value, just one guaranteed encore after the original has traded or chumped. The timing window matters too, since embalm only fires as a sorcery: the token cannot ambush a blocker mid-combat, so the resilience it offers is grindy rather than tricky. It rewards a deck happy to play the long, attrition-heavy game where every card needs to be worth two, and the flying body ensures both halves do the same job: pressure from above that an opponent has to answer with the same removal twice.