Cauldron of Souls

Persist, as a printed keyword, is a creature's own one-shot insurance policy: it dies, it returns smaller, and that is that. What this artifact does is detach that insurance from the body and hand it out by the tap, repeatedly, to whatever you point it at. The defensive read is immediate: tap before combat or in response to a board wipe, and your team survives the first death apiece, returning weakened rather than staying in the yard. The aggressive read is the one that earns it dedicated builds. Persist brings a creature back carrying the very weakness that a counter remover or counter-mover most wants as input: strip what came back with it, and the creature can die clean and return clean, again and again, turning the artifact into the engine half of a sacrifice loop. The cost structure keeps it grounded: five mana to deploy, then a tap each turn, a permanent and a tempo commitment before it produces anything. It is colorless, so any deck hunting a recurring death-trigger engine or wrath insurance can run it regardless of its mana base. The design choice that gives it range is granting the keyword rather than wearing it: this is not a creature with persist but a faucet that pours persist onto whatever is already on the table, value engine to one deck and panic button to another.