Rattleblaze Scarecrow

Most artifacts are built color-blind so any deck can slot them; this one inverts the premise, sitting idle as a vanilla 5/3 for six until your board supplies the colors to switch it on. Control a black creature and it gains persist, the recursion clause that brings it back one death at a time. Control a red creature and it swings the turn it lands. Run both and you get a hasty body that refuses to stay dead, which is the design at work: the keywords are conditional, not innate, so the rate is gated behind playing a specific color pair rather than charged as a generic artifact tax anyone can pay. The persist clause limits itself in the cleanest way available; each return adds a -1/-1 counter, shrinking the 5/3 to a 4/2, and once that counter is present the next death is permanent. The loop is finite by its own terms: what tracks the recursion is also what ends it, and the diminishing body means each return buys less than the last. The result is an artifact that wants a creature deck wrapped around it, an unusual ask for a colorless six-drop, and a clear case of conditional-keyword design that pays off building toward a board state rather than just resolving a spell.