Morgue Theft

Raise Dead's bargain was always a flat trade: a card to put a creature back in your hand, then mana to recast it, parity in hand size and nothing more. What flashback adds here is not a fix to a deficit but a second helping. The front-end cast does exactly what the old reanimation-lite spells did, at the same modest rate; once it hits the graveyard, the spell can buy back a second creature later for a noticeably steeper price before exiling itself. The asymmetry between the two costs is doing the balancing work: the flashback rate sits well above the front-end one, so the encore is a payoff you reach in a long, grindy game rather than something you fire twice on curve. That conversion (one card in your deck, two creature-returns over the arc of a match) is the whole point. A recursion spell that recurs itself smooths a black midrange deck's late game at precisely the moments it wants threats trickling back, without ever sitting dead the way a single-use buyback would. It is a quiet member of the early graveyard-matters era, unglamorous next to the reanimation payoffs it feeds, but it embodies that design moment cleanly: a yard that funds the same effect twice, and a spell built so the second use is earned, not free.