Loyal Cathar // Unhallowed Cathar

A two-drop with two lives, where the second life is strictly worse than the first: that gap between the faces is the entire idea. The front face is a clean, fair vigilance body, a soldier that attacks and guards in the same turn. Death does not end it; the death trigger returns the same card transformed, now a Zombie Soldier that swings but cannot hold the line. Crucially, the undead face carries no death trigger of its own, so the creature comes back exactly once: this is a one-way downgrade, not a perpetual engine. That single recursion is what keeps the price fair, and the lost block is the toll: you get persistence, but the thing that comes back can only march forward. The flavor and the mechanic move in lockstep here, a watchman sworn to defense rising as something that no longer remembers how to defend. It rewards trading the front face freely, attacking or chump-blocking with it knowing a slightly diminished attacker comes back the following end step. As a use of transform, this is the mechanic stripped to its barest expression: not a flip to a bomb, not a werewolf's day-and-night oscillation, but a single irreversible conversion that buys one extra body at the price of the creature's versatility.