Vodalian Merchant

Looting on a stick, attached to a body that mostly exists to carry the trigger. The card-filtering effect (draw, then discard) is a staple of blue's design vocabulary, but stapling it to a creature changes what kind of card it is: now it can be blinked, bounced and recast, sacrificed for value, or simply chump-blocked while the graveyard fills. The 1/2 frame is the giveaway that this was never meant to win combat; it is built to enter the battlefield, do its filtering, and become a sacrifice or recursion target. Merfolk gets it tribal access to a smoothing effect that the type usually has to earn through tempo and counters instead. The discipline here is that the filter is a wash on cards in hand, so the card pays for itself only when the discard is an upgrade or when the body and the trigger are each worth recurring; it rewards decks that treat a creature dying as the start of a sequence rather than the end of one. That makes it a quiet workhorse for graveyard-and-recursion shells, where a 1/2 that loots once is fine but a 1/2 that loots every time it returns is an engine.