Back for Seconds
Recursion spells have always had to choose their toll: pay full retail to buy a creature back to hand (Raise Dead and its lineage), or pay a premium in mana and card economy to skip the recast entirely (the reanimator lane). This one asks a different question. Return two creatures to hand at the plain rate, and if you were willing to spend a permanent you no longer needed (an artifact, an enchantment, a spent token), one of them at four mana or less walks straight onto the battlefield. Bargain is the pivot that separates the modes: without it you have a serviceable double Raise Dead; with it you have a targeted, cost-conditional reanimation spell that keeps the recursion floor as a fallback when the fodder is not there. The mana value cap is what keeps the cheat honest, ruling out the fatties that would make free reanimation degenerate while still reaching the midrange value creatures a sacrifice-fueled deck was already generating: the mana dork, the death-trigger body, the token-maker that just died. That is the tension the card resolves cleanly. It does not want a graveyard full of bombs; it wants a board that produces disposable permanents and a graveyard full of cheap creatures worth a second life, and it turns the debris of one plan directly into the fuel of the next.
