Flickering Spirit

The chassis is a self-blink switch bolted onto an ordinary 2/2 flier: pay , exile this Spirit, return it under its owner's control, repeat for as long as you have the mana to spend. By itself the loop produces almost nothing, because the body brings no entry trigger to capitalize on and the ability reaches only the Spirit that owns it: it cannot touch another permanent on the board. What it offers instead is twofold. First, a repeatable instant-speed escape from targeted removal, since the activation can fizzle a spell pointed at the creature by removing the legal target and returning the Spirit fresh. Second, and more usefully, a reusable engine for whatever else in the deck watches the battlefield fill: a Soul Warden gains life on every cycle, and any payoff keyed to creatures arriving fires again and again so long as you keep paying. The structural point is repeatability. One-shot blink spells expire after a single use, but a body that re-blinks itself converts a single relevant trigger into an arbitrarily large engine given enough mana. That open-endedness is exactly why the recurring cost matters: the price keeps the loop from running away on its own, so "what does it blink for" stays the real question rather than the Spirit ever being the payoff. Cleaner self-flickering bodies arrived later, but the underlying idea (a creature carrying its own blink switch) has remained a tool for decks built around triggers rather than around the Spirit itself.