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Moxonomy

Undertaker

Creature — Human Spellshaper1 generic manaBlack mana

Raise Dead was a one-shot card: cast it, get a creature back, move on. Bolt that effect onto a 1/1 body with a tap and a pitched card per use, and the recursion becomes a faucet that runs every turn the body survives. That is the trade this design makes, turning a sorcery's single payoff into a repeatable engine paid for in time and cards rather than mana alone. The discard does two jobs at once, funding the activation while clearing dead weight from hand so the graveyard becomes a second pool to fish from. The 1/1 frame and the tap are what keep the loop from spiraling: the body dies to a stray ping, and the tap caps you at one return per turn cycle. Timing tilts in your favor, though. The ability carries no speed restriction, so it fires at instant speed, letting you hold up the return until you know what you want back or rebuy a creature with graveyard hate already on the stack. Targeting locks before costs are paid, so you point at the creature you want first, then pitch a separate card to fund it; the loop wants a deck that fills its own graveyard incidentally and treats it as overflow storage. This is early-era black recursion doing the structural work the dedicated graveyard-toolbox creatures would later refine, built on the premise that a card in the bin is never gone, only filed for retrieval.

Undertaker (tsb)
TSB · #53special
Pricing
Normal: $0.32
Foil: $7.42
Oracle Text

Rules text

Black mana, Tap, Discard a card: Return target creature card from your graveyard to your hand.
Legalities

Format Status

Standard
N/A
Pioneer
N/A
Modern
Legal
Legacy
Legal
Vintage
Legal
Commander
Legal
Pauper
Legal
Brawl
N/A
Historic
N/A
Alchemy
N/A
Timeless
N/A
Standard Brawl
N/A
More formats
Old School
N/A
Premodern
Legal
PreDH
Legal
Pauper Commander
Legal
Oathbreaker
Legal
Gladiator
N/A
Penny Dreadful
Legal
Duel Commander
Legal
Future Standard
N/A
COMPETITIVEBRAWL
N/A
TLR
Legal
Printings elsewhere

Other printings

1 set
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