Worldheart Phoenix

A Phoenix that returns not on red mana but on all five colors at once, which is the whole tension of the design: the recursion is gated behind a payment most red decks can never make. The body itself is plain, a flying 2/2 that asks for almost nothing back when hard-cast. The graveyard clause is where the card's identity actually lives, built as a reward for a rainbow shell rather than for aggressive red. Pay one of each color and the Phoenix comes back larger, with two +1/+1 counters making it a 4/4 flier that can do this again every time it dies and you can scrape together five colors. WUBRG is the restriction that pays for unlimited recursion: a creature that comes back forever is fair only when the price is one most decks cannot meet, and demanding the entire color pie makes the loop a deckbuilding commitment rather than a free engine. This is one of the era's experiments in treating five-color payment as a deliberate alternative cost, an old shorthand for "you may do something powerful if your mana base spans the whole spectrum." The Phoenix's keyword and tribe are conventional; what makes it worth building around is that it converts a five-color manabase, usually a liability, into a recurring source of evasive pressure.