Liesa, Shroud of Dusk

The command-zone tax is a universal brake on infinite recursion, a scaling toll that ensures no legend loops back for free. This design does something quietly subversive with it: you can convert the tax into life instead of mana, paying two life per prior cast rather than the usual two generic. Since the body is a lifelinking flier that also drains the whole table for casting spells, that life is rarely scarce, and the brake becomes a resource you already hold rather than a wall you climb. The trade is deliberate. Mana is finite on any given turn, but a lifelink angle backed by a table-wide spellcasting tax keeps the total buoyant, so a mechanic built to discourage recasting fades into an afterthought. The symmetrical drain is the sharper half of the puzzle. Every spell anyone casts costs them two life, and in a game built on stacking value, opponents pay that toll far more often than a pilot content to sit behind a 5/5 and gain back what everyone else bleeds. It rewards a patient plan that turns other people's engines against them, taxing the table's ambition while the flier chips in the other direction. The angel is designed to make its own recursion cheap and everyone else's tempo expensive.