Howlgeist

The 4/2 body is the tell: two abilities pulling in opposite directions, stapled together to make a creature that wants to keep dying. The evasion clause waves through anything weaker than four power, so on a thinned board it connects for four nearly every turn. The catch is that a 4/2 trades into combat constantly, and that is exactly the point. Undying returns it as a 5/3 with a counter, which raises the evasion floor: now blockers need at least five power to stand in front of it, anything smaller still can't touch it. The friction is that the counter spends the recursion. Once the +1/+1 counter is on it, dying is just dying, so the loop is a one-shot upgrade rather than an engine. Where this gets devious is in pairing the death-want with an enabler: a sacrifice outlet, a free swing into a bigger blocker, anything that flips the fragile 4/2 into the bigger evasive 5/3 on your terms before the opponent can punish the small body. Left alone, it is a sticky beater that demands an answer twice and gets harder to block the second time. The six-mana price is the honest cost: this is a payoff that arrives late, not curve filler, and it leans on a supporting cast to convert its self-destructive streak into tempo rather than just chump fodder.