Brood of Cockroaches
A recursion engine built on a deliberately delayed trigger, and that delay is the entire design. Most creatures that crawl back from the graveyard do so at a sorcery-speed window or via a tutor that costs cards; this one returns to hand on its own, no slot spent on retrieval. The trigger fires at the beginning of the next end step regardless of whose turn it is, which means a death on your opponent's turn still floats the card back to you and still bills you a point of life before your next turn even begins. That structure earns it a place in sacrifice-driven black decks: the creature dies, you collect whatever death payoff you were after, and the card comes home without you ever having to dig for it. The body is irrelevant, which is honest rather than a flaw; the card is sold on renewable presence, not combat. The friction sits in two places. The life loss is the recurring drip, small but compounding across a long game. The recast is the real gate: getting it back onto the battlefield means paying again every cycle, so the loop is renewable but never free, and each rotation competes with everything else your mana wants to do that turn. Black has printed plenty of self-recurring fodder since, but the clean articulation (one life and a fresh casting to redeploy, then ready to do it again) was set down here early and rarely improved on for what it asks.
