Lingering Tormentor

Two black mechanics that rarely shared a body meet here: Fear, the old combat tax that lets a creature through unless the blocker is an artifact or a black creature, and Persist, the death trigger that brings the dying creature back under its owner's control. Each is a nuisance on its own; stacked, they ask the opponent to deal with the same evasive attacker twice. Kill it the conventional way and it returns immediately, still threading past most blockers, still chipping in, now diminished by the Persist mark to a 1/1. That mark is also what keeps the card from spiraling into an engine: a creature that dies while already bearing a -1/-1 counter does not trigger Persist again, so the recursion is a single refund, a short clock rather than an infinite loop. The only way past that ceiling is to scrub the counter before the second death (a +1/+1 counter cancels it through the state-based rule that pairs opposite counters off, restoring both the body and the future Persist trigger), and that is a deckbuilding commitment, not a default mode. Played straight, this is a four-mana threat with a patient value proposition: it costs an opponent two answers and a chunk of tempo to be rid of something black would happily trade a single card for.