Unwilling Ingredient

The value here is split across two moments that never overlap. On the battlefield it is a disposable 1/1 with menace, the body you were always planning to spend on an attack or an altar. The second moment comes from the graveyard: for three mana you exile the frog permanently, converting its corpse into a card and a point of life lost. This is not recursion; the frog does not come back. What it does instead is refuse to become a dead card. Most sacrifice fodder dribbles away with nothing to show once the creature dies, and the standard objection to running it is that you paid mana for a body and got only a trigger. Here the fodder buys back its own slot: whenever you have mana to spare, the graveyard ability turns the spent creature into a fresh draw, so the tempo you burned early returns later as a card. Menace is the smaller wrinkle, but it earns its keep, denying a free chump-block and preserving the choice to trade the body in combat rather than at the altar. The life loss is the wrinkle that keeps the exile clause from being pure upside: cashing in the corpse still costs a point, so a modest one-drop stays honest even at the moment it does its second job.