Pit Keeper

The recursion tax that asks you to fill the graveyard first. The return-a-creature effect is gated behind a threshold (four or more creature cards already in the yard), which inverts the usual order of operations for graveyard value: most effects that hand a creature card back work from turn one, but this one wants the digging done before it shows up. That makes it a payoff for self-mill and grindy attrition rather than an enabler of either, a body that arrives once the game has already produced its own fuel. The job is plain enough: a repeatable Raise Dead stapled to a creature you can blink, sacrifice, and replay, turning each loop into another card pulled back from the yard. The 2/1 frame is deliberately forgettable, because the body was never the point; it is a chassis for an enters-the-battlefield trigger that wants to fire many times. The brake is that the condition checks on entry, so an empty or thin graveyard returns nothing, and the threshold has to be met by the time the trigger resolves. In the long line of black recursion that runs from Raise Dead through every later toolbox creature, this sits at the patient end: it rewards the deck already committed to the long game, not the one looking to claw a single bomb back early.