Champion of Stray Souls

The activated reanimation here trades fodder for finishers on a one-to-one basis, and that exchange rate is the whole design conversation. Where most graveyard recursion pulls a single creature back, this sets X by the number of other creatures you sacrifice and returns exactly that many cards from your graveyard. The result is a symmetry-of-bodies engine: you are not generating value out of nothing, you are converting small creatures into large ones, or chaff into a rebuilt board of whatever died earlier. That demands a deck stocked at both ends, expendable attackers to feed the cost and worthy targets waiting in the yard, which is a narrower deckbuilding ask than the rate suggests. The ability runs at instant speed, which matters most as a response to spot removal aimed at the Champion itself: with the mana up, you can sacrifice the fodder and cash the engine in before the creature dies, rather than losing the activation entirely. The second ability is the quieter piece of engineering: rather than clawing itself back onto the battlefield, it puts itself from the graveyard directly on top of your library, a slow redraw that survives a sweeper, so a board wipe does not end the engine, it just resets the cost of bringing the Champion around again. That self-protection is what lets you commit the card to a grindy plan without a single sweeper closing the door for good. The cost is steep and the body is plain, so this was never built to win on rate; it was built to anchor a sacrifice-and-return loop that outlasts the opponent's removal.