Crypt Incursion
This is graveyard hate priced as a lifegain spell, and the design trick is that the two halves pay for each other. Most graveyard exile effects bill themselves as disruption first and tack on incidental value; here the scaling lifegain is the loud part, and it scales precisely against the strategies the exile is meant to punish. A reanimator deck stocking its graveyard with fatties, a dredge pile climbing toward a lethal turn, a creature-heavy aggro deck that flooded the yard: each of those is exactly the situation where this empties the most cards and returns the most life, three at a time. The narrowness is the cost that makes the rate possible. It only touches creature cards, and only a graveyard already worth attacking, so against a deck that never fills the yard it is a dead instant rather than a flexible answer. That single-axis focus is what lets it gain life on a scale that an unrestricted lifegain spell at the same cost never would. The instant-speed window matters more than the lifegain headline suggests: it lets you wait until the graveyard is fullest, or hold it as a response to the reanimation spell or the all-out alpha strike that was meant to end the game, converting an opponent's setup turn into a swing of a dozen or more life with the threats stranded in exile.


