Call from the Grave
Reanimation that takes no targets, offers no choices, and tells you nothing before you cast it. The whole effect runs on randomness a video game's rules engine can resolve cleanly but a table of humans cannot: a random creature from a random graveyard, with no information for either player to act on. That is the tell of where it came from, the cards packaged with the original MicroProse computer game and never legal in any sanctioned paper format, designed for a machine that could enforce "random" as a feature rather than a problem the players had to adjudicate. The self-damage clause keyed to the stolen creature's casting cost is the only restraint, and a perverse one: it punishes you precisely when the steal is most valuable, since the biggest bodies in any graveyard cost the most to drag back. Black's reanimation has always carried a tax (Animate Dead bleeds toughness, Reanimate charges life equal to mana value, Exhume hands a body to your opponent too), but those costs are knowable at the moment you cast. Here the cost is whatever the dice hand you, which makes this less a reanimation spell than a thought experiment: necromancy translated into the probabilistic logic of software rather than the deterministic stack of a card game. It is a window into a brief moment when Magic's designers imagined the game living inside a computer.
