Kheru Lich Lord

The reanimation here is built to be borrowed, never owned. Each upkeep you can lease a creature back from the yard, hand it flying, trample, and haste for one swing, then watch it leave at end of turn: not to the graveyard, but straight to exile, with a clause that overrides any other destination it might try to reach. That last line is the whole architecture. Most reanimation of this era let you keep what you raised, which is why it lived behind sorcery speed and steep costs. This one inverts the bargain: the recursion is repeatable and cheap on a per-use basis ( a turn), but everything it touches is borrowed against permanent removal. You cannot loop a single bomb forever, because the bomb you raise on one upkeep is exiled by the next; the engine rewards a graveyard stocked with bodies worth a single haste-fueled attack rather than one creature worth protecting. The randomness is the other tax. You do not choose what comes back, so the deck wants a yard where any hit is acceptable, which pushes the design toward redundancy over a single payoff. The question it asks is not the usual reanimator's "what is the best thing in my graveyard," but "how many things in my graveyard are good enough to throw away after one turn." A grindy value engine that treats its own fuel as ammunition rather than treasure.