Fleshless Gladiator

The recursion clause here reads like a standard graveyard-loop enabler until you notice the gate: it only unlocks once an opponent is three poison counters deep. That inverts the usual cost structure of a recurring body. Cards like Reassembling Skeleton or Bloodsoaked Champion pay a flat mana toll every time; this one pays no gate at all in the early game because the switch is simply off. The condition is not a cost the controller pays so much as a threshold the game state has to reach, which ties the card's entire value proposition to a poison-based clock running in parallel. Before that clock ticks over, it is a 2/2 that dies and stays dead. After it flips, the graveyard becomes a slow, repeatable stream of tapped attackers, each recursion draining a life from its own controller to keep the loop taxed. The corrupted mechanic that governs it is the interesting structural choice: rather than scaling the effect with poison counters, the design uses a single binary gate, so the ability is worthless or it is a full engine with nothing in between. That makes the card a payoff, not an enabler, a piece built to reward a deck already committed to poisoning the opponent rather than one hoping to get there. The life-loss rider keeps the sacrifice-fodder loops from spiraling infinitely without a life buffer, and the tapped clause denies it any defensive use on the return.