Chaos Shrine's Black Crystal
A recursion engine built on delay instead of raw value. Every nontoken creature you control that dies gets exiled into a private reservoir, and once per turn you cash one back with a finality counter attached. That counter is the tax the whole design pays for its inevitability: a creature returned this way can die only once more before it leaves for good, so the pile shrinks with use and the engine cannot loop a single body indefinitely. What it can do is turn a graveyard-hostile board wipe into deferred advantage, banking your losses and paying them back one creature per turn rather than all at once. The rhythm matters more than the ceiling here. Because the return happens on your upkeep, the artifact rewards a slow accumulation of exiled bodies over many turns and punishes the impulse to empty the reservoir; you are always one dead creature richer, never suddenly whole. It sits in the black recursion lineage that has long traded a life payment or a mana sink for graveyard access, but this asks neither: the cost is patience, and the ceiling is one creature per turn. Note that the trigger is not a replacement effect. A dying creature reaches the graveyard first, so the exile happens a beat later, off the death trigger on the stack; that gap leaves a narrow instant-speed window for opposing graveyard hate to snipe the corpse before it reaches safety. A grind piece for decks that expect to lose creatures faster than they can profit from a single reanimation, and want those losses to compound.
