Pyre Zombie

A recurring threat that bills itself in installments. Most reusable damage engines of its era lived on the battlefield and risked removal; this one inverts the model, doing its real work from the graveyard. The pattern is a loop: cast it, sacrifice it to throw two damage, then pay on your upkeep to drag it back to hand and run the play again. The cost is paced rather than steep, which is the point: you are renting a Shock that never permanently leaves, paying a tax each cycle to keep it alive. Against control and grinding midrange that taxes a single shot's worth of value per turn, but does so forever, the math eventually favors the patient player. The 2/1 body is almost incidental; nobody runs this for combat. The two halves do different jobs in different colors, which is why the gold cost is honest: black buys the resilience (the recursion), red buys the reach (the burn), and the card refuses to function as either color alone. Its weakness is graveyard hate, which short-circuits the whole engine in a way that battlefield-based damage dealers never have to fear, and the slow drip means it loses races it would win on a long enough clock. It is a value piece built for the era's attrition matchups, where the player willing to spend mana every turn for incremental reach outlasts the one trying to win quickly.