Selenia, Dark Angel
The self-bounce ability defines her, and it reads at first as a downside-free safety valve: pay 2 life, dodge a removal spell, replay her next turn. The friction is the life cost, and Tempest-era design treated that friction as a feature rather than a tax. Two life per activation turns Selenia into a repeatable life-payment engine, and the white-black color identity is exactly the pair that wants to spend life rather than protect it. Anything that converts paid or lost life into resources finds in her a body that volunteers life on demand, at instant speed, as many times as you can afford. The catch the card hands back is symmetry of risk: nothing stops you from bouncing her to zero, so the safety valve is also a fuse. That tension (the same button that saves her from a kill spell can kill you) is what holds the 3/3 flier honest at five mana. She is built to be returned to hand on your terms, which makes her hard to answer with targeted removal and trivial to answer with a clock, since every loop ticks your own life total down. The Phyrexian Angel typing and the willingness to spend life as a cost rather than guard it place her squarely in the lineage of cards that treat your life total as a currency, not a wall.
