Dutiful Attendant

The death trigger is the engine here, and it changes how the body reads. A 1/2 that wants to die is a recursion loop disguised as a chump blocker: trade it in combat, feed it to a sacrifice outlet, and it hands back a creature from the graveyard on its way out. The phrasing carries weight, because the trigger returns another target creature card, never itself, so the card cannot loop on its own; it needs a partner to keep the chain going. What it offers is a repeatable downpayment on graveyard value, paid not when it arrives but when it leaves. Black has always charged for its recursion somewhere: Raise Dead spent a whole card to do it once, Gravedigger stapled the effect to a sturdier body and a single enters-the-battlefield trigger, and reanimation spells cost real mana to cheat bigger threats back. This design relocates the cost into fragility instead of rate. Three mana for a 1/2 is no bargain on its own terms; the body is filler. The deal is that the value lands on death rather than on cast, which points the card toward sacrifice synergies and grindy attrition rather than anything it does standing on the battlefield. It earns its keep only in a deck constructed to kill it on purpose: aristocrats engines, graveyard value loops, anything that treats a dying creature as an opening rather than a loss.