Reave
Reave is an ability that triggers when a card leaves a graveyard for any other destination. It can be exiled or returned to your hand, library, or the battlefield. It doesn't matter where it goes. It's like a variation on Revolt from the "Aether Revolt" set that cared about whether a permanent left the battlefield but didn't care where it went.
Reave will appear on red and black and probably artifacts (I'm still figuring out the role I want artifacts to play in this set. I do know that this won't be an artifact-heavy set). The flavor concept behind reave is that this overwhelming growth of life on this plane has created a corrupted closed cycle where death itself is not an end, and viruses and diseases create a morbid sort of unlife. There will be some graveyard recursion and graveyard use as a theme in the set, but it's not going to be as neat and clean as in a set like Amonkhet and not as controlled and representative of necromantic magic as in Innistrad sets. Like the mutate mechanic, how graveyard recursion manifests is going to have that same feeling that it's out of control, and I'm still brainstorming how that will play.
Reave in red represents a desperate attempt to try to "cure" this horrible closed-off, corrupted cycle by trying to purge things out of the system entirely. Imagine a world where the eldrazi were the heroes! In black it can be used as a weapon to try to take advantage of the system and gain power over it.
Reave will typically be used as a destructive force in order to fit that flavor, representing in the set one way the entities of this plane attempt to survive within this increasingly hostile environment.
Reave also clearly is a parasitic mechanic that will requires X number of other cards in the set that remove cards from the graveyard for other purposes, and there's going to be a balancing act here. This is why I decided to simplify mutate so that it was less complex and easier to trigger.
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