Squirming Emergence

Reanimation usually pays for its power with a rate cap: three mana buys you a specific creature type, or a spell that drops a body into play but leaves the graveyard-loading half in your hand. This inverts the constraint. The ceiling on what returns is not fixed at printing; it is a variable you build toward, scaling with how many permanent cards you have managed to bin. A graveyard of three permanents reaches a three-drop, a graveyard of six reaches a six-drop, and there is no hard cap written into the spell at all. That makes it a payoff that grows better the longer the game runs and the harder you have worked to fill your own yard, exactly the self-referential math that self-mill and sacrifice shells generate while they go about their normal business. Fathomless descent formalizes the pattern (count what has sunk into the graveyard, then reward you in proportion), and pinning it to reanimation rather than damage or card draw is the wrinkle worth noting. Two restrictions keep the scaling in check. The target must be a nonland permanent card, so the lands padding your count feed the threshold but cannot themselves come back, and instants and sorceries neither count nor return. And it resolves on your own turn, a proactive investment you commit to rather than an ambush held up on your opponent's. The reward is open-ended; the cost is the work of getting there.