Reaping Willow

Reanimation usually costs mana and a card in the graveyard; this treewalks the equation by asking for mana and a self-inflicted wound it was already carrying. It arrives diminished, weighed down at the point of casting, and its recursion ability spends exactly that weight: pay a little mana, shed both markers, and pull back a mana dork, a value one-drop, or an aristocrat-style body from the graveyard. The neat consequence is that shedding those markers restores the willow to its printed 3/6, so the very penalty it entered with is also its ammunition and its dividend. The mana-value-3-or-less ceiling and the sorcery-speed clause keep the loop from getting greedy: you are grinding out small bodies on your own turn where an opponent can plan around it, not flashing back a bomb. What is left once the ability fires is a durable lifelinker, and lifelink is the reason this reads as an attrition piece rather than a tempo one: it wants long games where a few points a turn add up. The white/black hybrid pips let either half of the pair cast it, which suits a card built to outlast rather than race. One discharge, one body back, and a blocker that keeps you alive while it does its slow work: a small engine whose fragility on arrival is precisely what fuels it.