Chthonian Nightmare

Recursion metered by two resources at once, and structured so it can never sit still. The reanimation itself costs no black mana: you spend energy and eat a creature off your own board to pull one back from the yard. The trick is in the activation cost, because returning the enchantment to hand is part of what you pay to fire it. That means one reanimation per cast, always, and every subsequent trip requires recasting it for , which reloads a fresh three energy in the process. So the loop is a rhythm, not a burst: cast, activate once, sacrifice a body, recast, repeat, with each cycle costing you black mana and a creature. The energy pool caps how big a single hit can be (X energy for a mana-value-X target, three counters per cast), which quietly pushes you toward a graveyard curve rather than a single hidden haymaker. The sacrifice clause turns the whole thing into an aristocrats conduit where the creature you feed and the creature you retrieve both want to trade in death and enter triggers. Traditional reanimation has leaned on sorceries that exile themselves or demand a heavy front payment; this pays in bodies you were happy to sacrifice anyway, making it less a one-shot cheat than a repeatable grind that erodes a graveyard over several turns. The sorcery-speed clock keeps it out of instant-speed windows, so opponents always know which turn the value is coming.