Abiding Grace

The recursion is narrower than most reanimation engines, and that narrowness is the whole point. Capping the return clause at mana value 1 turns a repeatable end-step reanimator into a machine that only feeds on the cheapest bodies: mana dorks, one-drop hatebears, sacrifice fodder, and the small aristocrat pieces whose deaths matter more than their stats. A generic recursion enchantment at this cost would trivially loop midrange threats and rewrite the fair-white attrition math; the single-mana-value ceiling keeps the engine grinding rather than snowballing. The modal structure does the rest of the work. On turns when you have nothing worth bringing back, you take the life instead, so the enchantment never sits inert on the battlefield waiting for a graveyard to fill. Where earlier white recursion of this kind asked you to build around a fragile body (Sun Titan and its cousins had to attack, survive combat, and dodge creature removal to keep producing), this decouples the engine from a creature entirely. It still answers to a Disenchant or a Naturalize effect, but it is no longer vulnerable on the axis fair decks most reliably attack: it is not a blocker to trade with, not a target for a burn spell, not something that has to make it back to your next upkeep. What it produces is a slow leak of value every end step, quietly converting a graveyard full of one-drops back into board presence and incidental life across a long game.