Necromantic Summons

Reanimation has always been priced by the body it cheats into play, and at five mana this sits at the conservative end of the spectrum: it does the raise-dead job that cheaper spells handle for two or three. What the budget reanimators do not carry is the upside. Spell mastery turns flat retrieval into a reward that scales with how you have already spent the game, stapling two +1/+1 counters onto whatever returns once your graveyard holds two or more instant or sorcery cards. That clause does more design work than the rate suggests. A plain reanimation spell wants to fetch the single biggest thing in the yard; this one pulls toward a graveyard stocked with cheap burn and cantrips you have already cast, nudging the shell toward grinding spell-heavy midrange rather than a pure cheat-the-curve combo. The counters matter because they are permanent stats rather than a temporary pump: a creature that comes back with its baseline body keeps the extra two points, and one that returns without its own enters-with effects still arrives larger than it died. The cost never bends; spell mastery does not discount the mana, it sizes up the payoff. The whole effect is a slower, grindier take on a black staple, asking you to earn the bonus in spell density instead of paying for raw efficiency, and handing back a body bigger than the one that hit the yard.