Celestial Gatekeeper
In an all-creature block, every death trigger doubled as a tribal payoff, and this one reaches across two tribes at once. The reanimation is the whole transaction: when it dies it exiles itself and pulls back up to two Bird and/or Cleric permanents from the graveyard, planting it firmly in the cleric-recursion lineage that the surrounding block built around graveyard attrition and sacrifice loops. The self-exile clause caps the loop at one use per copy: it cannot retrieve itself, so each is a single, finite burst of value rather than an endless engine. The Bird half is mostly cosmetic (clerics hold the meaningful permanents), but the dual-tribe wording was generous in an era where the two types rarely overlapped, leaving room to recur a flier or a value body when one was on hand. The 2/2 flying frame is incidental; the card trades entirely on the instant it hits the graveyard, which is precisely the moment a sacrifice-driven cleric deck wants its threats dying. It is a component of the early cleric machine: a body you are glad to throw under a blocker or feed to an outlet, because death is when it earns its keep.
