Restless Apparition

The pay-either-color cost is the whole architecture. Cast it from white, from black, or from any mix, and that color-blindness carries straight into the firebreathing: every pump asks for three white-or-black mana, so the body cares about volume, not hue. Persist is what turns that mana sink into a recurring threat. The first death returns the Spirit a little smaller, dropping the base body to a 1/1, but a single activation buries that loss several times over, so the return never reads as a downgrade to plan around. The shrink is also the leash: once it carries the counter, the next death is final, which keeps a lone Spirit from looping forever and dovetails neatly with anything that wants to grind it back to nothing. What it builds toward is a resilient blocker that doubles as a slow clock and a sink for leftover mana, demanding only quantity from whatever feeds it. The design lives at the crossroads of two ideas this era kept circling: white-or-black hybrid costs that let one card slot into either of two decks, and persist as a second life that leans on the battlefield rather than the graveyard. Few designs of the period married both as cleanly, with the pump exploiting the resurrected smaller body to make the return feel like a reload instead of a tax.