Nine-Lives Familiar

The revival counters do something quietly clever with the phrase "if you cast it." A body that returns eight times is absurd on its face, so the design fences the loop off from the graveyard-recursion and reanimation tools that would otherwise cheat it back in: only a cast copy shows up with counters, and every death spends one. Cast it, and you get a 1/1 that keeps standing back up, one life poorer each time, until the counters run dry and death finally sticks. That structure makes it a value magnet rather than a combo piece. It absorbs removal one spell at a time, blocks into much larger creatures without regret, and above all it feeds anything that cares about a creature dying: a repeatable death trigger wearing a cat's body, willing to die on demand as long as it has a counter to spend. The return is delayed until the current turn wraps up rather than firing off immediately, so a mid-combat death leaves the creature briefly absent from the battlefield: a short window that some effects reward and others punish, and one that keeps the graveyard occupied just long enough to matter to the odd milling or exile-from-yard interaction. The whole appeal is persistence without infinity: nine lives, counted down honestly, one at a time.