Steel Leaf Paladin

Six mana for a 4/4 first striker was a fair body in this era, but the mandatory bounce is the reason the card exists at all. Returning a green or white creature you control reads like a tax: the cost printed in the body for a rate that would otherwise be undercosted. Build around it, though, and the drawback inverts into an engine. In a deck stuffed with enters-the-battlefield triggers, the Paladin becomes a reset button you recast for value, picking up a creature on resolution to fire its trigger again next turn. The catch is timing: without a way to blink or flash it in, the bounce only happens on the turns you cast it at sorcery speed, so there is no combat-step rebuy, only a slow grind across turns. The deeper tension is the requirement that you own a green or white creature when it lands, because on an empty board it bounces itself and undoes the play entirely. So the card wants a board wide enough to pluck something useful, yet costs enough that an aggressive shell rarely has the tempo to spend a turn rebuying. It sits in the lineage of allied-color gold creatures that ask you to commit to two colors before they pay out, an early and clumsy version of the blink-and-recursion synergy later sets would package cleanly. The first strike is the floor: it keeps the body relevant in combat even on the turns the bounce has nothing worth grabbing, which is often the most you can ask of it.