Breathless Knight

Reanimator payoffs usually reward the graveyard by cheating one enormous body into play; this one rewards the act of doing it, and doing it again. The trigger keys off the mechanism rather than the payload: any creature you control that entered from a graveyard or was cast from a graveyard adds a counter, so a chain of small returns (a recurred mana dork, a looped aristocrat body, a reanimated hatebear) each grows the Knight rather than demanding one big fatty. That shifts the reward from breadth over height. The counters are permanent, so the growth compounds across turns, and the evasive lifelink frame means every increment both closes the game faster and buys back the life these decks bleed digging through their own libraries and paying to reanimate. What balances it is the 2/2 underneath: it does nothing until the graveyard is already a working resource, so it asks you to assemble the recursion shell first and treats the beater as the reward for having built one. It is a design tuned for the value engine that lives in the yard as a renewable resource, not for the graveyard-combo shell that treats reanimation as a single decisive act; a deck that returns one thing and stops gets almost nothing here, while a deck built to loop small creatures turns the body into a threat that quietly outgrows removal.