Lightning Phoenix

The self-recurring aggressive flyer is one of red's oldest fascinations, and this one ties its return to a specific behavioral demand: you have to actually be winning the damage race before it will crawl back. The recursion clause only checks whether an opponent took three or more damage across the whole turn, not whether this creature dealt it, which quietly makes the effect a payoff for the entire board rather than a self-contained loop. Chip in with a couple of other attackers or a burn spell, meet the threshold, pay one red, and the 2/2 hops back onto the battlefield at your end step, already hasty and flying for the next turn. The inability to block is the honest tax on that engine: the body only ever points forward, never backward, so parking it on defense is not an option the card will ever grant. That constraint pairs naturally with the phoenix lineage, where the fantasy has always been a threat that dies and comes back rather than one that trades and stays dead; the design here just prices the resurrection in a resource (turn-long damage output) that an aggressive deck is generating anyway. The result is a recurring flyer that punishes sweepers and spot removal by refusing to stay in the graveyard, provided the deck around it keeps the opponent's life total moving in the right direction.