Yarus, Roar of the Old Gods

Face-down creatures are one of Magic's most awkward payoffs to build around: a morph or manifest is deliberately anonymous, a placeholder that trades information for surprise, and most cards that reward the state stop at the moment of unmasking. This one treats the face-down condition as an engine to sustain. The haste anthem gets manifested and morphed bodies attacking the turn they arrive, the combat-damage trigger turns those anonymous 2/2s into a card-draw pipeline the moment they connect, and the death clause bends the usual sacrifice math into something genuinely strange: a face-down permanent that dies comes back face down, then flips up. A manifested creature card is no longer a one-shot 2/2 you throw at a blocker; it survives the trip to the graveyard, returns as a fresh face-down body, and cashes out into whatever it actually is. Sacrifice outlets stop being value drains and become recursion loops with a payoff waiting on the far end. What keeps the whole thing from spinning free is that the death trigger cares about permanent cards specifically, so an instant or sorcery turned face down by manifest simply dies for good. The design asks you to invest in the least glamorous bodies in the game and rewards their disposability, making the throwaway 2/2 the point rather than the placeholder.