Ritual of the Returned

Reanimation usually means cheating back the whole package: the original creature, its abilities, its enters-the-battlefield trigger, every line of keyword text. This keeps only the dimensions. What comes back is a black Zombie with the exiled creature's power and toughness and nothing else, which inverts the usual reanimator math. Normally the body is the least interesting thing about a reanimation target; here the body is the only thing on offer. That sounds like a downgrade until you notice what the exile clause buys. Because the original card never returns to play, this slots into a strategy that mills or discards expensive creatures purely for their stats, treating the graveyard as a size catalogue rather than a stockpile of effects. The token is a fresh permanent with no memory of what it copied, so it carries none of the inherited liabilities (a steep upkeep, an attack requirement, a sacrifice clause) that come bundled with cheating a creature back whole. It also resolves at instant speed, a quiet edge over the sorcery-speed reanimation that dominates the archetype: you can hold it open as a combat trick, ambushing an attacker with a Zombie sized to whatever oversized body happens to be in your bin. The design is a study in subtraction, isolating the most universal property of a reanimation target (its statline) from everything that usually makes the spell worth its cost.