Lord of the Undead

Most tribal lords push the team and stop there. This one carries a recursion engine that turns the graveyard into a renewable resource: the +1/+1 anthem is the lesser half of the card, and across a long game the loop is the real payoff. The activated ability does the heavy lifting, converting attrition into card advantage one creature at a time. Trade your Zombies in combat, buy them back, and the grind tilts your way. The reward scales with a critical mass of expendable bodies (sacrifice fodder, death-trigger pieces) more than with a single bomb, since each return costs a fresh investment of mana and a tap. The fragility is pure liability: a 2/2 dies to almost anything, and killing it shuts the engine off, so the plan only holds when the board is already wide enough to survive losing the lord. It belongs to a line of early black tribal pieces that defined Zombie decks around resilience and recursion rather than raw aggression. The price for that recurring value is a body that begs to be removed and the -and-tap cost on every reclamation; the upside is a return ability with no timing clause, so it operates at instant speed, rebuying a creature in response to a board wipe or on the turn before you untap. What you get back is a graveyard that never quite empties.