Bladewing the Risen

An early dragon-tribal captain whose first act on arrival is to undo a death. The enters-the-battlefield trigger reaches into your graveyard and reanimates a Dragon permanent, which in the early years meant the trickle of legendary dragons already dying in play, but the wording quietly future-proofed itself: every Dragon printed since slots into the recursion target, and the cost of that reanimation is folded into a body you were going to pay for anyway. That is the design idea worth noticing. Most black reanimation asks you to spend a card and a slot to cheat one creature back; this one staples the effect to a flier that also pumps the whole team for two mana an activation, turning a single resolution into a board and a lord at once. The Rakdos casting cost is the brake on all of it, demanding two black and two red pips before the engine turns on. As a named centerpiece of dragon tribal, it set a template the type returned to for years: a legendary dragon that rebuilds from the graveyard and rewards committing to the creature type rather than splashing one bomb. Later dragon commanders refined the rate and the angle, but the structural move (recur a dragon on arrival, then buff the survivors) starts here.