Relentless Skaabs

Undying on a creature this size is supposed to come at a discount, and the additional cost is where this one pays for itself: you exile a creature card from your graveyard to cast it, so the 4/4 is purchased twice over, once in mana and once in a body you've already used. That graveyard tax is the whole balancing act. It demands a deck that fills its yard before turn five, and it competes with every other thing that wants those exiled creatures (delve, flashback, reanimation), which is why the card never floated free of its archetype. The reward is a recursion loop that fights attrition on its own terms: undying brings it back the first time it dies, and if you can clear the resulting +1/+1 counter, it can die and return again. Where most undying creatures are cheap chaff that grind out one extra trade, this one is a recurring four-power threat that turns a stocked graveyard into a body that keeps coming back. The tension it resolves is a familiar self-mill problem: graveyards overflow with creature cards that did their job and now do nothing. This converts that surplus into a casting cost, then hands you a creature stubborn enough to justify spending it.