Orzhov Pontiff
Most haunt creatures spend their death trigger reaching back to bless something you still control. This one is built to be killed and to do its dirtiest work on the way out. The modal trigger fires once when the body enters and again when the haunted creature reaches the graveyard, and the -1/-1 mode is the reason the card carries a reputation: a board sweeper wearing the body of a 1/1 Cleric. Feed it to a sacrifice outlet, point the haunt at one of your opponent's creatures, and you have banked a second wave of -1/-1 to land the moment that creature follows it down. Against a field of one-toughness bodies the two pulses can clear an entire team without a removal spell ever leaving your hand. The +1/+1 mode exists, but the design was never about the pump; the tension is that a fragile three-drop becomes a repeatable mass-shrink once you control the timing of both deaths. That control is the whole trick: because you choose where the haunt attaches, you can hang it on a creature you intend to kill yourself, turning haunt's usual dependence on the opponent's choices into an engine you schedule. Worth knowing what doesn't work: blinking the Pontiff returns it to the battlefield rather than killing it, so it re-reads the enters trigger but never the haunt half. To cash the second pulse, it has to actually die.


