Gutterbones

Recursion is the whole pitch, and the design pays for it with two separate taxes. The first arrives with the body: it enters tapped, so it cannot block or trade up on the crackback, making a 2/1 for a single black aggressive by construction rather than defensive. The second gates the return ability, which only unlocks when an opponent has lost life during the same turn and fires only on your own turn: no ambushes, no end-step rebuys, no purely defensive value. Note that the condition is lost life, not combat damage, so it reads any drain or ping (a Blood Artist trigger, a Bump in the Night, a fetchland tax on the opponent's own resources counts too if it is your opponent paying it), which widens the enablers considerably. In a shell that is not applying pressure, the corpse stays put and the recursion is dead text. Get the clock running, though, and the skeleton becomes fodder that refuses to stay dead, feeding sacrifice outlets and death triggers repeatedly. The lineage is the recurring one-drop that treats the graveyard as a hand: Bloodsoaked Champion asked for a creature to die first, Reassembling Skeleton returned straight to the battlefield at sorcery speed. This one takes a different route: the ability only buys the card back to hand, so returning it to the board costs the return plus another cast, more mana overall but split across two smaller payments, both payable the same turn. It rewards a deck already winning and does little for one that is not, which is precisely the point.