Bitterblossom

A two-mana enchantment that pays you a creature every turn for the rest of the game is the kind of math that breaks formats, and the life loss is the only governor on it. Each upkeep clips a point off your total whether you need the body or not, so the card is its own clock: a token engine that taxes the controller, and the longer the game runs the more that tax compounds against you. That self-inflicted bleed is what made the design printable. It also made the card faster than it looks, because a deck that wins before the life total matters never pays the full price. Token aggro lists used those flyers as evasive beaters and as fuel: anthem effects turn a zero-cost token into a real threat, sacrifice payoffs eat the surplus, and tribal payoffs reward the Faerie type the enchantment keeps stamping out. The result was a card that warped its formats hard enough to earn a Modern ban for a stretch before coming back, the rare token-maker treated like a combo piece rather than a value engine. The friction that holds it back from pure degeneracy is the empty turn it costs: no token until your next upkeep, no immediate board impact, just two mana spent and a promise that the engine will outpace the life it bleeds.