Cobbled Lancer

The additional cost is the whole design conversation here: a 3/3 for a single blue mana is a rate blue creatures almost never get, and the price is paid in graveyard depth rather than mana. You cannot cast it with an empty yard, so it demands a game plan that fills the bin early, and it competes for those creature cards with everything else that wants to eat the graveyard. What sets it apart from the usual "cheap body, steep condition" template is the back half: once it is in the graveyard, you can pay to exile it and draw a card, so the discount is never fully free but the card is never fully dead either. That two-stage arc (aggressive early beater, then a late-game cantrip you pay off from the yard) is what makes the exile-a-creature cost feel like a loan rather than a tax. It rewards decks that treat the graveyard as a resource to be spent twice: mill it, cast the Lancer off the surplus, then cash the Lancer itself in when the board stalls. The Zombie Horse typing is flavor doing quiet work, an undead mount cobbled together from the discarded, and the mechanics mirror it: something built from what you have thrown away, then thrown away again for one last use.