Promise of Bunrei

A deterrent dressed as an insurance policy. The trade it offers is brutal in the abstract: lose one creature, get four bodies back, and any opponent contemplating a swing or a removal spell has to weigh whether handing you a swarm is worth the kill. The friction is that you do not choose when it pays out. It fires on the first creature you lose, period, so a chump block or a one-mana ping can spend it just as readily as a fair trade, and a board wipe only ever returns four Spirits no matter how many creatures it took. That window is exactly why the card lives in sacrifice shells rather than fair midrange: feed it deliberately and the four tokens become fuel for the next outlet, fodder for an Ashnod's Altar, triggers for an aristocrat engine, chump blockers that buy a turn while the real plan develops. Read as a combat tax it is unreliable; read as a free conversion of one creature into four, payable on your terms if you control the trigger, it is an engine piece. The Spirit type does the rest of the work, slotting it into the era's token-and-Spirit lineage where four ground bodies feed everything from anthem effects to sacrifice loops.