Gollum's Bite

Shave two toughness off a creature for one black mana and you have a familiar rate: enough to trade with an early attacker, useless against anything with a real body. The interesting part lives after the spell resolves. Once it hits the graveyard, paying to exile it does not recast the effect; it tempts you with The Ring, folding a spent removal card into the Ring-bearer subgame so a dead answer converts into a step up the temptation ladder. That reframes when you want to fire it. Casting it early is a straightforward tempo play; using it, then exiling it later, turns a card doing nothing in the yard into progress on a mechanic the rest of the deck is presumably built to exploit. The sorcery-speed clamp on the graveyard mode is the cost that keeps the two halves from stacking: you cannot advance The Ring reactively, so the recursion competes with your main-phase development rather than riding along with a combat trick. Most spells that engaged The Ring did so on the front half, as the spell was cast. Putting the temptation on a recursion-style back half is the wrinkle, letting a color that already leans on its graveyard squeeze double duty out of a spell it was going to cast anyway.