Sunstreak Phoenix

The recursion clause hands the day/night mechanic a second job. Where most cards attach a bonus to the daytime and nighttime states themselves, this one keys off the transition: every flip of the cycle, in either direction, offers to pay a small red tax and return the bird to the battlefield tapped. That makes the phoenix a payoff for churning the meter rather than for parking on one side of it, and the enters-the-battlefield line closes the loop by forcing day if the game is in neither state, guaranteeing at least one flip is always pending. Phoenixes have always been the color's recursion mascots, the creatures that dare you to trade with them because they will not stay dead; this one just changes the price of admission from a spell-count trigger or a discard cost to a cadence you can engineer. The 4/2 flying body is priced to die: it wants to be blocked, killed, and swept, because the graveyard is where the engine actually lives. The catch is the reset itself. Each return costs mana at a specific window and lands the phoenix tapped, so you are trading a turn of pressure for the guarantee of the next one, and the whole plan depends on keeping the cycle in motion rather than letting it stall on a single side.