Benalish Partisan

Cycling is usually a card-selection ability you use once and forget: pitch the dead draw, dig for the answer, move on. This design inverts that relationship. It wants to be discarded early, then keeps clawing back, because every subsequent cycle you perform offers to buy it out of the graveyard for a small tax. The perpetual +1/+0 keeps that loop worth repeating rather than tedious: each return leaves the body a little larger, so a deck feeding a steady stream of cheap cyclers turns a 1/2 into a growing lifelinking threat that refuses to stay dead. The whole thing lives in the interaction between its two halves. Left alone, it is a modest lifelink body with a cycling escape hatch. Placed in a shell that cycles for other reasons, it converts each of those triggers into an optional reanimation, and the perpetual buff means the reward compounds rather than resetting to a fresh 1/2 every time. That perpetual keyword is the mark of a digital-first design: a static permanent modifier that survives leaving the battlefield, tracked outside the normal rules of counters, which is only enforceable in a client. It reframes what a recursion payoff can look like when a card is allowed to carry state across zones without a physical counter to represent it, and it makes the humble act of cycling a resource worth engineering around rather than a footnote to a mulligan decision.