Mirko, Obsessive Theorist

The reanimation clause reads as the headline, but the surveil trigger is the pivot the whole engine turns on. Each time you surveil (once per instance, regardless of how many cards that surveil looks at) Mirko takes a +1/+1 counter, and that counter does two jobs at once: it grows an evasive body and it raises the power ceiling on what the end-step reanimation can target. Because the comparison is self-referential, the bigger Mirko gets, the deeper the pool of creatures it can pull back. That coupling is the design's cleverest move. A surveil-heavy shell is not merely stocking the yard as a side effect of smoothing draws; every surveil is simultaneously fixing your next few turns, filling the graveyard, and unlocking heavier reanimation targets on a delayed clock. The finality counter is the tax that keeps this from spiraling: a creature returned this way is exiled rather than dying again, so the ability rewards a wide graveyard of one-shot value bodies over a single creature looped forever. The 1/3 that flies and holds the fort with vigilance is deliberately modest on arrival, because the design assumes it will not stay a 1/3: left alone in a mill-and-dig shell, it becomes a climbing threat and a recursion valve whose two roles feed each other, one surveil at a time.