Ghost Council of Orzhova

The blink is the whole machine, and it's pointed inward. Sacrificing a creature to flicker this Spirit looks like a survival tool, a way to dodge removal by exiling itself in response, but the reentry trigger is what closes the loop: every return drains an opponent for one and refills your own life. Pair the sacrifice cost with a recursive token engine or a creature that wants to die and the council becomes a self-feeding drain, each loop converting expendable bodies into incremental life swings while keeping a 4/4 on the table. The structure anticipates a whole guild's worth of design that came after it: the Orzhov idea that death is a resource and life is a currency to be traded back and forth, here compressed into a single legendary body with a built-in sacrifice outlet and a built-in payoff. The friction is the one-generic-mana tax and the fact that the council comes back at the next end step rather than immediately, so the flicker is defensive, not a free repeatable activation within a single turn. That timing window is deliberate: it protects against targeted removal and board wipes without spiraling into an arbitrary same-turn combo, leaving the drain incremental rather than infinite on its own.