Archpriest of Shadows

The recursion is gated behind combat, and that gate is the whole design conversation. Reanimation in black usually pays a cost up front: discard a body, sacrifice something, lose life, then bring the payoff back at sorcery speed. Here the price is instead a swing that connects, which means the engine only runs if you can protect a five-mana ground creature long enough to hit a player or battle. Deathtouch is the load-bearing keyword for that: a 4/4 that trades up on any block deters the chump-and-race defense that would otherwise starve the trigger, so the body enforces the very combat step it needs. Backup 1 lets you split the difference before you ever attack, handing the counter and the deathtouch (plus the recursion trigger) to a creature already positioned to get through, which turns a slow attacker into an instant threat on a more evasive body. What makes it grind rather than combo is that the return targets a creature card from your graveyard, one per connection, with no filter on what comes back: value on repeat, not a single explosive loop. It sits in the lineage of black attrition creatures that ask you to keep bodies on the board rather than assemble a two-card kill, closer in spirit to a Gravecrawler-fueled sacrifice shell than to any turn-three reanimator plan.