Mistmoon Griffin

A death trigger that pays you a creature better than itself, with the recursion routed through the graveyard rather than the hand. The 2/2 flying body is the deposit, not the payoff: when the Griffin dies, it exiles itself (no looping it back, since it removes its own corpse) and reanimates whatever creature card happens to sit on top of your graveyard. The design discipline lives in that "top creature card" clause. You cannot select the target; you control it only by sequencing what dies, so the Griffin rewards stacking your bin so the right thing is on top when its turn comes. That makes it a delivery system for a single big payoff rather than a repeatable engine, and the self-exile is the brake that keeps it honest. It comes from a school of reanimation that hid the effect inside a creature with a trigger rather than handing you Animate Dead or Reanimate outright, asking for setup and a sacrifice instead of a tutor. A modest 2/2 flier on its own; a one-shot graveyard-to-battlefield pipeline if you build the yard to feed it.