Magnanimous Magistrate
The reprieve counters turn recursion into a budget you spend down. Most white reanimation prices each return in mana, in a fresh cast, or in a one-shot exile clause; this instead hands you a pool of five and charges the mana value of whatever died against it. A one-drop costs a single counter and buys four more returns down the line; a five-drop empties the reserve in a single trade. That arithmetic is the whole strategic axis: cheap deaths stretch the engine while expensive ones exhaust it, favoring a wide, disposable curve dying often over one costly body dying once. The restriction to nontoken creatures with mana value one or greater is the natural check, cutting off the obvious loop of sacrificing zero-cost fodder for free value. It reads as a slow, top-heavy 3/4 attached to a machine that only starts paying out once other things start dying. The timing wrinkle is worth noting: the trigger fires on death and returns the card immediately, functioning as a repeated blink-and-recur rather than a graveyard raid, undoing removal and sacrifice outlets alike as long as the reserve holds. What it asks for is a deck built to lose creatures on purpose, and enough of them queued up that the five-counter tank has time to drain.
