Ivory Gargoyle

A recursion engine that taxes you in cards rather than mana, and a clean illustration of how early design priced a returning body. The death trigger brings it back when the turn winds down, every time, with no exile clause and no counter to cap the loops; the entire cost of immortality is paid in your draw step. That means the gargoyle does not fight removal so much as outlast it, trading your card flow for a 2/2 flier that simply refuses to stay dead. The release valve is the more interesting half of the design: paying to exile it ends the loop on your terms, lets you stop skipping draws once you no longer need the blocker, and (because exiling it leaves no body to trigger the return) hands you the timing of when the skipped-draw penalty stops. The tension is self-balancing. Keep the gargoyle alive through combat and removal and you fall behind on cards a turn at a time; exile it and you rejoin the draw step but lose the engine. It is a study in symmetrical attrition: a creature that promises permanence and charges for it on a meter only the controller can reset, from a time when "comes back when it dies" was novel enough to warrant a steep, ongoing tax rather than the one-shot finality clauses later sets would adopt.