Resurrection

The original reanimation spell, and the one every later iteration has been priced against. Four mana at sorcery speed with no downside, no exile clause, no life payment, no card disadvantage beyond the spell itself: that is the rate every subsequent designer walked back. Animate Dead came in cheaper but stapled an enchantment to the creature. Reanimate cut the cost to one but charged life equal to mana value. Exhume opened the door for both players. Unburial Rites added flashback but exiled itself. Every one of those is a correction for something Resurrection did not bother to balance, because in 1993 the graveyard was not yet understood as a second hand. The card is interesting now precisely because it is uninteresting: a clean baseline that shows what the mechanic looks like before the rules-text inflation that turned reanimation into one of the format-warping archetypes in the game. White is also the wrong color for it by modern standards (black inherited the recursion identity almost immediately), which makes Resurrection a small artifact of a color pie that had not yet settled. The reprints have been sporadic and the rate has been outclassed in every constructed context for decades, but the card's place in the lineage is fixed: this is what the function looked like before anyone knew what it was worth.