Midnight Recovery

Cipher tries to convert a one-shot effect into a recurring engine, and pairing it with graveyard recursion exposes exactly why that conversion is hard. Raise Dead at four mana is already a steep price; the encode clause is supposed to justify the markup by promising a free re-buy of a creature card every time the carrier connects. The friction is that the loop only ever pays out two steps removed from when you want it: the spell first resolves normally to return one creature, then you encode it onto a creature that has to survive and deal combat damage to a player before the copy fires at all. By the time that chain completes, you are pulling value off an attacker that was already getting through, which is the board state where the extra card matters least. And the encoded copy returns a creature card to hand, not the battlefield, so each trigger is a tempo investment rather than an immediate threat: you draw a body, then still have to recast it. What it rewards is a deck built to attack unimpeded with a small evasive creature, treating the encode as insurance that the graveyard keeps refilling the hand. That is a narrow ask, and cipher as a mechanic only appeared in one wave of designs, never revisited, in part because effects like this one carry too much setup tax for the payoff they promise.