Mourner's Surprise

Raise Dead has been black's simplest recursion since the game's earliest days: pay a little, take a dead creature back to hand, move on. This pays one extra generic mana to bolt a second effect onto that base, and the surcharge buys a body: a 1/1 Mercenary whose tap ability hands +1/+0 to any of your creatures. The sorcery-speed clause on that pump is what defines the token. It is not a combat trick held for a blocking surprise; it is a recurring main-phase buff, cast forward into your own attack rather than reactively. Point it at the very threat you just returned and the two halves rhyme: the creature comes back, then grows a little larger every turn the Mercenary survives. The body itself is unremarkable, but the pump gives it a job past chump-blocking, converting an incidental token into a slow attrition tool. That is the design logic underneath the two-for-one: card advantage that keeps compounding in small increments. You recover a dead threat and keep a permanent that quietly widens your combat math for the rest of the game. Nothing about either half demands attention, and the quietness is deliberate. This is a grinding sorcery for a black deck that wins by trading up and refusing to empty its hand, not by chaining one explosive line.