Jolted Awake
White reanimation has always come with a tax the color pays gladly: exile it face-down and flip it later, sacrifice something first, cap the mana value low. Here the tax is energy, and the card meters out exactly its own budget: two counters, no more, unless another energy source has been priming the reserve. Everything about how the spell balances flows from that single generation event, because the return only fires if the target's mana value is two or less on its own; anything bigger demands you have banked energy elsewhere before this ever resolves. It reframes reanimation as a resource-accumulation problem rather than a mana-cheating one, which is a genuinely different axis for white to work on. The cycling clause is what keeps the card from ever going dead: when there is nothing in the yard worth reclaiming, or when the energy math does not add up, it becomes a two-mana draw and drops out of the equation. That floor is why a one-mana sorcery this conditional can still earn a slot; you are never holding a card that does nothing, only choosing which of its two jobs to run. The energy-payment structure ties the effect to a subtheme rather than making it a standalone engine, so its ceiling lives in decks already stockpiling counters for other reasons, and its floor lives everywhere else as a replaceable cantrip.


