Mortuary

A recursion engine that works by intercepting creatures on their way out, and the cleverness is in the order of operations. The trigger fires after a creature dies, so the card actually touches your graveyard before it gets restocked onto your deck: that ordering is precisely why death payoffs (drain, token triggers, anything keyed on a creature hitting the yard) still resolve. The other design choice that defines it is the destination. Returning a dead creature to the deck rather than the hand is what separates this from a straightforward value piece. It does not close a loop by itself; the sacrificed creature comes back where you cannot immediately replay it, so any engine built on it needs a draw effect to pull that creature back into reach before it can be recast. Bolt this onto a sacrifice outlet plus a way to draw the rebought creature each turn and the deck supplies fuel that never runs out; the job here is the restocking, not the looping. The friction is deliberate and severe: with no outlet and no way to recast, the engine clogs your draws and starves you of fresh cards, since every dead creature stacks back over whatever you were trying to dig toward. It reads now as an early articulation of the graveyard-as-resource idea black would spend the next two decades making cheaper, faster, and far less self-punishing.