Flameblade Angel

The punishment-tax made into a creature, and a strange one because it taxes the act of dealing damage rather than the act of casting. The trigger fires on every damage source an opponent controls that connects with you or something you control: a swinging attacker, a burn spell to the face, a damage-based wipe, even an opposing creature's own activated ping. Each one pays a point of damage straight back, and crucially the redirect lands on the source's controller rather than the source itself, so chipping a creature of yours and chipping you directly are billed the same way. That makes this a slow-clock deterrent: the more an opponent does, the faster they bleed, and the only way to stop the bleeding is to leave you alone or get the angel off the table. The body demands an answer, but the trigger only cares about damage, so the bind is narrower than it looks: burn the angel down and you eat a return point, while reaching for destroy, exile, bounce, or a -X/-X means the tax never fires at all. That seam is the design's real limit. It rewards a grindy, attrition-leaning shell rather than a tempo one, since the tax compounds over many turns rather than spiking a single one. The ceiling depends entirely on how much damage the opponent is forced to deal, which is why it bites against go-wide aggression and pinger-heavy boards and does almost nothing against a control deck content to answer it cleanly and sit back.