Sidisi, Regent of the Mire

Reanimation usually works by ignoring cost entirely: pitch the giant thing, pay a fixed price, cheat the difference. This asks for a ladder instead. The sacrificed creature's mana value sets the ceiling, and you can only reach one notch above it, so returning a six-drop demands feeding a five-drop into the activation. The payoff scales with what you're willing to spend, and building around it means assembling a curve of sacrificial fodder rather than a single fat target and a way to discard it. The sorcery-speed clause and the tap cost cap you at one climb per turn, which reframes the whole card: this is an engine that grinds upward across a game, each activation converting a smaller body into a larger one, not a burst that dumps the biggest creature in your yard onto the battlefield turn four. It also self-excludes ("other than Sidisi"), so the legend can't feed itself, and the graveyard has to already hold the target at value X plus one, which quietly punishes lines that fail to line up the increments. A 1/3 for two that does nothing the turn it lands is not a body you win with; it's a recursion axis you win around, and the reward for stacking the ladder correctly is that every creature death becomes an upgrade rather than a loss.