Firemane Angel

Killing it once accomplishes almost nothing. The body is a fine 4/3 flier with first strike, but the design lives in the graveyard clause: every upkeep, whether the Angel is on the battlefield or sitting dead, it ticks a point of life off the top. That upkeep-locked trigger is the conceit. The reanimation clause is deliberately expensive (ten mana) and restricted to your own upkeep, so the card cannot lurch back into play in response to a swing or a kill spell; it returns on a schedule, not a reflex. The life trickle keeps paying out in the meantime, so the card behaves less like a creature you cast and more like an attrition engine you seed early and cash later. Its era was experimenting with threats that refused to stay dead without leaning on dedicated reanimation spells, and this one stated the idea plainly: the graveyard is a holding pattern, not a loss. Against a grindy opponent the math runs the wrong way for them. The life drip continues, the body comes back, and the only real answers are exile or some way to shut off your upkeep entirely. The point was never the stats; it was the question every attrition deck wants to ask: how many times do you have to kill the same threat before it actually stays gone?