Recurring Nightmare (Original Art)

Recurring Nightmare is a three-mana black enchantment from Exodus (1998). You can sacrifice a creature and return Recurring Nightmare to your hand, to return target creature card from your graveyard to the battlefield (activate only as a sorcery). It’s one of the most broken reanimation engines ever printed, due to its repeatability and resilience – it returns itself to hand as part of the cost, making it nearly impossible to remove in response. Recurring Nightmare can use any creature as a sacrifice outlet to return huge threats from the graveyard, while also enabling combo loops with value creatures. This card is a real grind engine, that can shift into a combo piece in the right deck. In its Standard era (Tempest-Urza’s Block, 1998-1999), Recurring Nightmare dominated the competitive scene alongside Survival of the Fittest. This infamous archetype – “Recurring Survival” or “RecSur” – was a hybrid of a midrange and a combo deck that abused creature-based engines to generate value loops. At the 1998 World Championship, Brian Selden’s winning deck “Cali Nightmare”, showcased what this card could do. Survival of the Fittest filled the graveyard, and Recurring Nightmare brought back the best creatures every turn – often Verdant Force or Spirit of the Night – while recycling value creatures like Uktabi Orangutan for artifact hate or Spike Feeder for life gain. Recurring Nightmare got banned in Standard in 1999. This card is also banned in Legacy and Commander. Recurring Nightmare is on the Reserved List, and will not be reprinted.