Retriever Phoenix
Phoenixes have always been about the loop back from the graveyard, and the mechanic they usually recur on is combat: Skarrgan Firebird and Rekindling Phoenix return when the deck keeps attacking. This one recurs on a card-advantage engine instead. Because learn is what it replaces, and because the creature offers itself as an alternate learn payoff from the yard, every Lesson-fetch or loot you would otherwise spend on filtering can instead reanimate a hasty flier. That reroutes the recursion cost from "attack every turn and hope it dies well" to "run enough learn effects to keep buying it back," which is a fundamentally different deckbuilding contract: the phoenix wants a Lesson package, not a burn-heavy board stall.
The wrinkle worth sitting with is the timing on the return. The graveyard clause fires whenever you would learn, which is often a sorcery-speed choice attached to another spell, so the recursion inherits that spell's window rather than any independent instant-speed escape. And the cast-restriction on its own learn ("if you cast it") means the reanimated copies do not refill their own fuel: bringing it back from the yard gives you the body and the haste, but not another learn, so the engine only runs as long as the rest of your deck keeps generating learn events. It is a phoenix that trades the resilience of unconditional recursion for tighter integration with a specific card-selection shell.
