Haunted Dead

The discard cost is the whole engine. Returning this from the graveyard asks you to pitch two cards, which reads as a steep tax until you notice the cards you discard are not gone in a graveyard-matters shell: they are fuel for flashback, delve, escape, and reanimation, and the discard becomes a feature rather than a fee. Each return brings back the 2/2 body along with a fresh 1/1 flying Spirit, so the card functions as a self-recurring token generator that converts surplus hand into a trickle of chump bodies. That makes it less a creature than a sacrifice-fodder outlet: one loop pays a 2/2 and a 1/1 for two cards and two mana, feeding aristocrat drains, convoke, and anything hungry for something to throw away. The Spirit arrives on the enter trigger regardless of how the card got to the battlefield, so reanimating it from the yard or hardcasting it both mint the token. The friction is real and intended: the two discarded cards are a cost, not a downside you can route around, so you cannot loop with an empty hand, and the ability punishes you in matchups where cards outvalue bodies. Keep the graveyard stocked and the hand fed with cards you were happy to dump, though, and the body becomes almost incidental. It is a recursion outlet dressed as a Zombie, and the value lives entirely in what you were going to discard anyway.