Zodiac Dragon

Part of a Japanese-language Zodiac cycle that only reached English-speaking players through a digital-only reissue, this dragon's whole pitch is a recursion clause bolted onto an otherwise plain 8/8. The body does nothing a dozen other big red dragons can't, but the death trigger reframes how you spend it: chump-block, race, throw it into removal, and it returns from the graveyard to your hand, so the only thing you ever lose is the nine mana to recast it. That makes it a reusable threat for any deck that can sacrifice it for value, since the creature recurs to hand instead of staying dead. The catch is purely economic. At with no haste, no evasion, and no immediate effect, the dragon asks you to pay full price every time the loop resets: it is hard to kill permanently but equally hard to deploy more than once a turn. The design predates the wave of "dies, then comes back" creatures that govern the return with built-in limiters like finality counters, and it shows. There is no cap on the recursion at all, just the brute fact that a nine-mana body is its own tax. A blunt, honest version of an idea later sets would refine into something with an actual brake.