Disturbed Burial

Buyback debuted as Tempest's signature mechanic, and this is the clearest statement of what it was for: a recursion engine you never run out of, sold at the cost of overpaying every time you want to keep it. The base spell is a cheap raise-dead, but the surcharge is the whole design. Pay it, and the card returns to your hand as it resolves, so each casting both rebuilds your hand and refills the engine, leaving the same spell ready for next turn. The friction that keeps this honest is mana: five total to recur a single creature and hold the card is a deliberately bad rate per use, so the value only accrues over a long game where you have nothing better to spend on. That positions it as an attrition tool rather than a tempo play, a way to grind a graveyard of creatures back one at a time until the opponent's removal runs dry. Buyback was Wizards experimenting with how to make repeatable effects feel earned instead of degenerate: the answer here was to front-load the tax so the card is fair the turn you cast it and only powerful across many turns. The mechanic has resurfaced occasionally since, but this remains the textbook illustration of its core bargain, a spell whose ceiling is "I will keep doing this forever" and whose floor is "I paid two mana for a worse recursion spell."