Guardian Scalelord

The reanimation trigger scales off power, which is the whole engineering problem the card sets out to solve. White does not natively loop permanents out of the graveyard, so an attack-triggered reanimator in this slot is unusual on its own; the design routes around white's typical restriction by tying recursion to combat and to a stat white can actually inflate through counters. A 3/4 base reads modestly, but Backup 1 pointed at itself on entry bumps it to a 4-power attacker, meaning the first swing can pull back a four-mana-value permanent, and anything it grows into thereafter widens the pool. Because the trigger names nonland permanents rather than creatures, the ability reaches artifacts, enchantments, and planeswalkers that a straight white reanimation spell in the same color would leave in the yard. The genuinely interesting wrinkle is where Backup points. It fires once, when the Dragon enters, and if you aim it at another creature that creature gains flying and the reanimation attack trigger until end of turn, scaling off its own power rather than the Scalelord's. That turns a single ETB into a fork: buff yourself to maximize the recursion ceiling and keep the engine self-contained, or hand the whole package (evasion plus a power-scaled reanimation swing) to a bigger attacker whose own attack this turn can then rebuild the board. The counter is small; the decision it forces is not.