Heartmender

Persist pays for itself with a self-inflicted wound: the creature comes back diminished, and that lingering -1/-1 counter is what arms its next death to be permanent. This body turns that tax into a renewable engine. The upkeep trigger scrubs a -1/-1 counter off every creature you control, so the counter persist leaves on this elemental is gone by your next upkeep, resetting it to die and return all over again. The narrow self-loop is the obvious read, but the wider reach is the point: any creature that came back through persist, anything shrunk by wither or a curse effect, gets healed in lockstep across the whole board. It is a maintenance ability wearing a 2/2 frame. The design tension is that this card directly undoes the cost wither and persist are built around: those mechanics buy their power by leaving counters behind, and this answers the question persist quietly asks, which is what happens when the bill never comes due. Strip the counter every upkeep and the recursion piece refuses to wear down, with a board-wide cleanup for an entire category of counter-based shrinking thrown in. Persist and its later mirror undying were conceived as a paired study in death-as-resource, one paying in -1/-1 counters and the other gaining +1/+1; this is the card that voids the debt on the harsher half.