Vat of Rebirth

Reanimation is normally black's premium effect, gated behind its speed: a Reanimate or an Animate Dead pays cheaply and cheats a fatty out early. This inverts the deal. The recursion is here, but it is not free and it is not fast: you must first feed the machine four artifacts or creatures that die on the battlefield, then pay three mana and tap at sorcery speed to spend the counters. What that turns the card into is a self-assembling engine for a sacrifice deck rather than a shortcut for a big-spell deck. Counter accrual rewards exactly the boards that already want to die: tokens, aristocrat fodder, artifacts sacrificed for value. Every death that was going to happen anyway builds toward a permanent, no-strings creature return, and the effect refills as long as the graveyard keeps getting stocked. Landing it for a single mana matters because it lets the collector sit on the battlefield early, ticking up quietly while your other pieces trade and sacrifice. It asks for patience where reanimation usually asks for tempo, and it pays off a game plan of attrition rather than one of explosive turns. For grindy sacrifice shells the four-counter threshold is the real cost: it is a rate you earn across several turns of bodies dying, not a spell you cast on the swing.