Stir the Grave

Reanimation usually fixes its price in advance: pay a set toll, get a corpse back, often with a downside the body has to carry forever. This one floats the cost instead, scaling to whatever you point it at. The same spell that recurs a one-drop mana dork early can drag a heavy threat out of the yard later, and you pay the target's mana value plus one black mana. That conformity is also its honesty. There is no underworld discount here, no Reanimate-style life shortcut letting a cheap spell cheat a ten-drop onto the battlefield. The "or less" clause is a ceiling, not a bargain: X must be at least the target's mana value, so you always pay the creature's cost in full. The clause adds nothing you could exploit, since a player wanting a smaller body simply declares a smaller X and leaves the rest of their mana untapped; what it really documents is that the spell scales cleanly across the whole graveyard rather than locking to one cost. The toll being honest is precisely what keeps this out of combo territory and pins it as a black midrange value tool: the cheaper and cleaner the creature, the better the rate. It is the slow, fair register of a black staple effect, built for grinding attrition where mana is plentiful and the graveyard fills with bodies worth a second turn in play.