Withered Wretch

Graveyard hate that walks into combat instead of fizzling on an empty graveyard. Most incidental graveyard answers of its era were one-shot spells: Tormod's Crypt blows up a yard once, Coffin Purge cantrips and exiles a single card, then both are gone. This is the recurring version, a creature that sits on the table and taxes one mana per activation to pick targets off a graveyard for as long as it lives. That structure changes the strategic axis entirely. Against a single flashback card or one reanimation target, you exile in response and move on; against an engine that wants to rebuild a graveyard turn after turn, the Wretch is an attrition piece that never runs out of charges as long as the opponent keeps committing fuel. The two-power Zombie does the quiet work alongside the activation: a hate creature that dies to a stiff breeze hands tempo to the deck you are trying to disrupt, but a 2/2 trades up, blocks, and clocks while the activation keeps the graveyard barren. The cost is the obvious one: it must survive, and a removal spell turns your graveyard lock back into open territory. That fragility is the price of the recurring engine, and it is also why every later iteration of the same idea, the creature that exiles graveyard cards for a small fee, traces back to this template.