Zombify

Reanimation at its plainest: four mana, no discount, no downside, no strings. That straightforwardness is exactly what made it a workhorse of the genre for years. The whole strategy of cheating an expensive creature into play depends on first getting it into the graveyard, and the cards that fill the yard (Buried Alive, the discard outlets, the mill spells) carry the real engineering; the return spell only needs to be cheap and unconditional. Where Animate Dead and Necromancy attach an enchantment to the reanimated body, leaving it vulnerable to any enchantment removal, this just hands you the creature outright with no aura to disenchant. The trade is mana and speed. Two-mana reanimation spells exist and are faster, but they nearly always demand a sacrifice, a discard, or a life payment in exchange for the discount. Paying full sorcery-speed price buys a clean board state with nothing for an opponent to interact with after resolution. That makes it the safe-but-slow option in any reanimator shell: the version that gives you the creature and only the creature, without the rider that comes back to bite you. It is the reference point newer reanimation spells get measured against, the baseline rate from which every cheaper alternative subtracts something to justify its discount.