Unbreakable Bond

Reanimation spells almost always attach a catch to pay for the tempo swing: a life payment, a discard, a restriction on what comes back, a downgrade to the returned creature. This one flips the accounting. The lifelink counter is not a tax; it is a bonus, welding a lifegain engine onto whatever gets pulled from the yard. A returned fatty does not just crash back into play, it starts refilling the life total you spent racing or reanimating in the first place, which reframes the spell from pure resource conversion (mana for a body) into something closer to a stabilization tool. The wrinkle is that the counter grants lifelink to a creature that has no innate lifelink; on a creature that already lifelinks, the counter does nothing, since multiple instances of the keyword are redundant. And because counters fall off when a permanent changes zones, the gift is conditional: kill the reanimated creature and the lifelink goes with it, so a second trip through the graveyard means paying five mana all over again. That front end is what keeps the card grounded, since the marquee reanimation spells cost far less and ask you to build around their downsides. Here the downside is upside, which is the honest trade for the price. It is a slower, safer reanimation effect built for decks that want to grind a game to a life-total advantage rather than win on the spot.