Skarrgan Firebird

Bloodthirst always priced its payoff against the cost of swinging into combat first: you got the bigger body only if you had already drawn blood that turn. Most bloodthirst creatures asked you to pay that toll once, on the way down. This Phoenix asks twice. The three counters arrive only after an opponent has bled, and the graveyard recursion fires under the same condition, so the entire card is gated behind a single repeating premise: keep dealing damage and the bird never stays dead. That coupling sets it apart from the generic resilient flier. A 3/3 flier for six is unremarkable on rate, and the return to hand costs three red, but in a deck built to chip an opponent every turn it becomes a renewable threat that re-enters as a 6/6 each time bloodthirst is live. The design is honest about its own dependency: it rewards the aggressive board state it requires and offers nothing to the player who has stalled out. Where a Phoenix usually defines its color identity through cheap, reckless recursion that needs no setup, this one routes the entire mechanic through the same aggression clause twice over, making it a midrange beater that thinks it is a burn finisher. The friction is deliberate: stop pressuring the opponent and you lose both the fattened body and the road back from the graveyard in the same stroke.