Sheoldred's Restoration

Reanimation has always been sold with a drawback attached, from exile clauses to discard taxes to the life you pay to cheat the curve. What this design does differently is turn that drawback into a dial set at cast time, and split the two settings across two colors. Cast it for its base cost and it stays a mono-black recursion spell that punishes you in proportion to your greed: the bigger the creature you drag back, the more life it costs you, a built-in brake on looping fatties. Pay the kicker and route the same spell through white, and the exact tax inverts into a gain scaled to that same mana value, so the biggest target becomes the most rewarding one. The card itself exiles after resolution, so there is no engine here to assemble, only a single high-leverage cast to sequence correctly. The structure is what makes it worth studying: a mono-color spell with a second-color escalation folded in, rather than a gold card that demands both colors up front. A black deck runs it at face value; an Orzhov deck unlocks a strictly better version of the same effect without the designers having to print two cards. It asks a deckbuilding question (do you have the white to unlock the upside?) before it ever asks a targeting one.