Demilich

The four-blue cost printed on this is the number you never pay in full: it drops by one for each instant and sorcery already cast this turn, so the card is built to land near-free at the tail of a spell chain, when the mana is spent and the graveyard is deep. The body is almost beside the point next to the loop it powers. Attack, and it exiles an instant or sorcery card from your yard, copies it, and offers the copy to cast: a recurring burst that converts a stocked bin into repeatable burn or card flow. Death is not the end, either. The graveyard return still demands its full mana (reduced by the same spell-count discount), plus exiling four instant and sorcery cards on top; the yard is fuel for both the attack trigger and the recursion tax, never a shortcut around the cost. That is the tension the design resolves so cleanly. A threat that gets cheaper the more you cast and eats spells to come home punishes any deck that runs dry: it wants spell velocity that outpaces its own appetite. Spell-copy and storm-adjacent shells had long wanted a recursive closer that scaled with their engine rather than sitting inert. This is the payoff creature that fills the slot, not a midrange value body but a finisher that treats a full graveyard as ammunition and asks how many times you can reload before the game is over.