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Moxonomy

Excava, the Risen Past

Legendary Creature — Spirit Horse2 generic manaRed manaWhite mana

Reanimation is a black idea, and the one job Boros keeps failing to do on its own is bring something back and use it this turn. Here the recursion is welded to the declaration of an attack: the trigger fires the moment this is declared as an attacker, before combat damage, and whatever climbs out of the graveyard arrives already on the battlefield rather than in hand, so it can block later or feed a sacrifice engine the same turn. The recursion ceiling stays low and cheap, capped so the payload is a small permanent rather than a haymaker, and the finality counter is the tax that stops the loop from running forever: each returned card is a one-shot, exiled on its next trip to the graveyard, so the ability rewards a deck stocked with disposable bodies over a single fatty worth chaining. Stapling a 1/1 flying Spirit body onto the returned card is the quiet part doing real work: it hands every reanimated artifact or non-Aura enchantment an evasive attacker and a creature line those permanents did not otherwise have, which lets aristocrat and death-trigger payoffs treat them as sacrifice fodder. Flying and haste on the front end serve the engine directly: because the value fires on the attack step, an evasive attacker that comes down swinging starts grinding the turn it lands. What results is a Boros aristocrats-and-recursion piece built to churn incremental bodies out of the yard, not to cheat one enormous creature into play.

Excava, the Risen Past (soc)
SOC · #2mythic
Pricing
Normal: $0.93
Foil: $0.39
Oracle Text

Rules text

Flying, haste Whenever Excava attacks, return up to one target artifact, creature, or non-Aura enchantment card with mana value 3 or less from your graveyard to the battlefield with a finality counter on it. It's a 1/1 Spirit creature with flying in addition to its other types. (If a creature with a finality counter on it would die, exile it instead.)
Legalities

Format Status

Standard
N/A
Pioneer
N/A
Modern
N/A
Legacy
Legal
Vintage
Legal
Commander
Legal
Pauper
N/A
Brawl
Legal
Historic
Legal
Alchemy
N/A
Timeless
Legal
Standard Brawl
N/A
More formats
Old School
N/A
Premodern
N/A
PreDH
N/A
Pauper Commander
N/A
Oathbreaker
Legal
Gladiator
Legal
Penny Dreadful
N/A
Duel Commander
Legal
Future Standard
N/A
COMPETITIVEBRAWL
Legal
TLR
N/A
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