March of the Drowned
Mono-black has offered one-mana, single-creature recovery since the earliest days of the game, and that floor is the safe, replacement-level half here: Raise Dead with a tribal upgrade bolted on. The engineering lives in the second mode. Spend the same lone black mana and pull back two cards instead of one, provided both are Pirates. A generic two-for-one at one mana would warp the color's recovery costs, so the upside is fenced behind a creature type narrow enough that most decks never light up the second line at all, while the tribal deck it was built to support treats the card as recursion that pays for itself twice over. What the sorcery timing actually enforces is tempo rather than protection: whatever you name is already dead, so this was never going to save a creature mid-combat. You reload on your own turn, then spend a later turn recasting what you got back. It reads as a clean lesson in printing a strong tribal payoff without inflating the non-tribal rate: the floor is a card everyone has cast a hundred times, and the ceiling only opens for the deck holding the right graveyard.

