Midnight Ritual

The math is brutally honest: every Zombie costs you a creature card already in the bin, plus one mana on top. That's the whole design philosophy here. It refuses to be a free recursion engine because it converts dead creatures into something worse than what was lost (a vanilla 2/2 in place of whatever the original creature was), so the exiling clause is doing real work rather than gating the ability. What that constraint buys is a payoff that scales with how full your graveyard has gotten: the X-cost mass conversion rewards an attrition deck that has already traded bodies for bodies and wants to cash the leftovers back into a board. The exile cost also means those creature cards are genuinely gone, which sidesteps the usual problem of recursion loops by making each card a one-shot resource. It is a sorcery, so there is no surprise army at the end of a stalled combat: you commit on your own turn, with full knowledge of the count, and your opponent answers from there. The flavor lines up cleanly with the rate: a ritual that drags the fallen out of the ground and reanimates them not as themselves but as shambling, undifferentiated husks. The body you get back is never the body you buried.