Deathless Knight
A recursion engine whose only cost of return is that you already wanted to do the thing that triggers it. The 4/2 haste body reads as a beater, but the design intent lives in the graveyard clause: die once, gain life, and the knight walks back to your hand for you to recast. The trigger is deliberately cheap and deliberately capped, firing on the first lifegain each turn rather than every instance, so it rewards a lifegain deck that spreads its gains across turns rather than one that bursts them all at once. That single-trigger limit is doing structural work: you get one return per turn, and you still pay four to redeploy, so no repeatable drain effect converts the card into a free loop. The two toughness is the other half of the balance, leaving the body fragile enough that recursion is a feature you lean on rather than a wall opponents cannot break. Mechanically it belongs to a small lineage of creatures that fold graveyard return into their own text (the Bloodghast school, though this one demands lifegain rather than lands), and it points the ability at the aristocrats-adjacent middle ground where sacrifice, drain, and lifegain overlap. The hybrid mana is the quiet enabler: it slots into mono-black, mono-green, or the Golgari builds that most want a body that refuses to stay dead.
