Jackalope Herd

A 4/5 for four mana is, on its own stat line, ahead of curve for the era; the bounce trigger is the bill that comes due. The design pins the body to a strict tension: you get an oversized blocker the moment it resolves, but the first spell you cast on a later turn snaps it back to hand. That clause is the whole card. It forbids the natural play pattern of "deploy threats, then develop," because every development step undoes the previous one, and it punishes spell-dense decks hardest while leaving a creature-light, land-heavy plan free to leave the Herd parked on defense. The cleverness is that the drawback also doubles as a feature for anything that wants a creature to leave and re-enter the battlefield, or a body to replay for value, since the bounce is mandatory and predictable rather than something you have to engineer. Read one way it is a downside-stapled fatty; read another it is a self-returning permanent that asks you to build around its rhythm instead of around its raw size. The Herd belongs to a small Exodus lineage of creatures sold cheap with a structural string attached, the kind of design that trusts the player to find the deck where the string is slack rather than taut.