Cauldron Haze

Persist usually lives stapled to a single creature, a built-in second chance baked into the body. Here the mechanic is pried loose and handed out at instant speed, to as many creatures as you like, granting a one-time resurrection to a board that was never printed with one. The timing is the whole play. Cast it in response to a board wipe or a mass sacrifice and your creatures die, then return diminished but intact; cast it with a sacrifice outlet open and you can loop a creature whose death triggers matter, since the persist return and an existing enters-and-dies engine feed each other. The diminishing counter is the brake: persist self-terminates the moment a creature carries it, so any loop wants a counter-remover or a body that does its work on the way out rather than the way in. Castable for one generic plus either white or black, it sits in exactly the two colors that built aristocrat-style sacrifice decks, and it reads less like a combat trick than like a converter that turns an opponent's removal into card advantage. Granting persist to creatures that lack it remains rare enough that this stays the reference point when the question is how to extend the keyword past its home on a single stat line.