Cephalid Aristocrat

What reads as a liability is the whole engine: the trigger fires whenever this becomes the target of a spell or ability, friend or foe, and it does not care what that spell intends to do. The body is just a legal target with legs; five mana for a 3/3 was never the appeal. The mechanism rewards a deck built around cheap, redundant targeting, where any pump, any protection aura, any random buff doubles as two cards in the bin. The friction is that most single-use spells only target once, so the engine wants repeatable sources of targeting (a creature with an activated ability that aims at it, or an aura that returns to hand to be recast) rather than a one-shot Shelter you cast and lose. That distinction is the design's real demand: the deck has to manufacture a steady stream of targeting events, not just point one spell at it. This sits in an early-era lineage of self-mill enablers, but the approach is inverted from later graveyard engines that filled their own bins on cast or on death. Here you spend the rest of your hand aiming spells at a creature whose only job is to be aimed at, and the graveyard fills as a byproduct of every targeting decision you make.