Vigor Mortis

Reanimation that gives you a reason to splash green. The base effect is the dependable black raise-dead: pay the four, return any creature card from your graveyard with no clauses on its size or type. The wrinkle is the optional green pip, an early use of the "if was spent" rider that lets the card price its bonus into your manabase rather than its rules text. In a mono-black shell you get plain reanimation; in a two-color deck that can produce green, the returned creature arrives with a +1/+1 counter, a small but permanent edge that matters most on something already worth cheating into play. That counter is the whole tension of the design: it costs you nothing on the card and everything on your color commitment, so the spell rewards the kind of graveyard-leaning two-color deck the era's mechanics were already nudging players toward. As a reanimator it sits in the unglamorous middle of the lineage, less ambitious than the dedicated cheat-it-into-play spells but with a kicker that answers the perennial problem of how to make a guild-color reanimation spell feel like more than a strictly worse mono-color one. The green pip does that work by making the splash itself the payoff.