Forsaken Miner

Recursion has always come with a tax, and the interesting move here is where the tax gets paid. Older self-returning threats bought their persistence with a downside baked into the body: a cost to reanimate, a random discard, a life payment. This one flips the ledger. The 2/2 costs nothing extra on the front end, and the only permanent liability is that it can't block, an entirely fair concession for a creature meant to attack and die and attack again. The recursion instead keys off crime, an aggressive trigger that folds the return cost into actions already in progress: a ping at an opponent's face, a piece of removal, a graveyard hate spell. Do something hostile, then refund the body for a single black mana. That coupling is what the whole card turns on. It is a persistent threat only insofar as the surrounding deck keeps committing crimes, which makes it a payoff wearing the clothes of a one-drop rather than a value engine that stands alone. It sits in the lineage of Bloodsoaked Champion and Dread Wanderer, cheap black recursion creatures that punish sweepers and refuse to stay dead, but where those pay their return cost in raw mana or an attack requirement, this one pays it in intent. The crime clause turns the creature into a barometer for how interactive the deck around it wants to be.