Deathmist Raptor

The recursion clause keys off "a permanent you control is turned face up," not off the Raptor itself, and that wording is the whole trick: every other morph, megamorph, and manifest in the deck doubles as a resurrection button. Most face-down payoffs are linear, a one-time event (pay the flip cost, take the counter, done), but here the act of unmasking anything hauls the Raptor back from the graveyard, and it can return face down to sit as a 2/2 and be flipped again later, restarting the loop each time. The engine feeds itself: kill it, and the next unmasked permanent puts it right back, ready either to swing or to wait for the next return. It never grows in the process, since it drops its +1/+1 counter every time it dies and re-enters; what recurs is a fresh 3/3 with deathtouch, not an accumulating threat. Deathtouch is what lets the grindy version win the combats it needs to: a body that trades up with anything and refuses to stay dead is a problem for both the deck trying to race it and the one trying to out-grind it. The payoff for an entire face-down strategy, then, was not a static lord or an anthem but a single creature that converted a normally one-shot mechanic into a recurring one, turning a pile of vanilla 2/2s into a board that kept reassembling itself.