Phyrexian Delver

Reanimation with a built-in tax: the life payment scales with what you bring back, so cheap fodder costs little and a fatty bleeds you for a serious chunk of your life total. That spell-on-a-body framing predates the more famous later attempts at the same effect; the trigger is stapled to a 3/2 you can recast, blink, or sacrifice and rebuy, not a one-shot sorcery that leaves the board untouched. The mana value tether is what disciplines the design: it refuses to let you Reanimate a fifteen-drop for a fixed cost the way a card like Animate Dead does, pricing the cheat directly against the thing being cheated. At five mana, the body is an afterthought; the trigger is the whole transaction, and the deck that wants it is the one with creatures already in the bin and a way to fill the yard before this lands. This is the workmanlike version of an effect later cards would push to extremes, the one that asks you to do the graveyard setup yourself and charges you in life rather than tempo.