Defiled Crypt // Cadaver Lab

A payoff that fires on an unusual trigger, and one built to stop caring how the graveyard empties. Defiled Crypt does not ask what you did in the yard, only that cards left it, and the once-per-turn clamp keeps a full recursion shell from spitting out a token army in a single loop. The trigger is deliberately generous about how the exodus happens: reanimation, flashback, escape, delve, exile-based tuck effects, anything that pulls cards out of the graveyard feeds it a body. The design work is in decoupling the payoff from any specific engine, so it slots into whatever graveyard shell already exists rather than demanding its own. Cadaver Lab is the piece that can feed the trigger. Unlocking that door returns a creature card from the graveyard to your hand, a Raise Dead stapled to a door, and that return is itself a card leaving the graveyard, which means with the Crypt already unlocked the Lab feeds it: one unlock, one Horror, no waiting for anything to die again. The two doors read as separate cards, but they close a loop. Paying each door's cost as a sorcery lets you commit to the piece you need first and unlock the other when the yard is stocked, rather than paying the whole cost up front for an engine with nothing yet worth pulling out.