Master of Death
A recursion engine wearing a three-mana body, with a surveil-2 on entry that keeps the graveyard stocked every lap rather than firing once and going quiet. The upkeep clause is the design's real hinge: while the card sits in your graveyard, a single life buys it back to your hand at the start of your turn, no mana required for the retrieval itself. That is a loan, not a loss. Every attack into a trade, every chump block, every sacrifice puts the card somewhere it wants to be, because the graveyard is where its return trigger lives. The 3/1 statline is a tell about intent. It hits hard enough to pressure a life total but folds to almost any interaction, and that fragility is doing work: a durable body would waste the recursion, while a disposable one keeps activating it. What keeps this from being oppressive is that getting it back only returns the card, not the board presence. You still spend mana to recast it if you want the body again, so the loop costs a turn cycle and a mana investment each time around, and the surveil that refills your graveyard only fires when you pay that cost. What you are buying, then, is a wizard that treats death as a detour and a self-mill trigger that reloads every time it comes back. The rate is modest per cast; the value is in how many casts you get.
