This completes the 4 punisher cards I wanted to make for this set (one for each rarity).

This effect is more commonly seen at uncommon with cards like Zombify or Defy Death but Exhume was a common, so I think when necessary there's precedent for printing this at common... Or should I swap this card's rarity with Want Some?.

To the battlefield?

Combine this with, oh, the turn 1 punishment creature and, well, win.

@Vitenka How would it be any different if it returned a creature to your hand? And tell me, has anyone tried building a deck with Vexing Devil and Exhume / Raise Dead? I think the power level would be pretty comparable.

Exhume may have been a common, but that was one heck of a destructive common during a time where two turn kills were the norm. For comparison sake, on Gatherer, Exhume gets 4.614 stars. That's a score on par with cards like Armageddon and Black Vise. All that, and Exhume comes with a drawback, which often decreases a card's rating.

Is this card fair? That's a trickier question to answer... I'm not sure. You could totally set this card up on round one and two, but then you'd use two spells to deal 5 damage to an opponent. Maybe that's fine. It does seem very good for a common... but it's also a lot harder to set this card up in a draft.

Oh, and now I'm starting to remember that you've said in the past that commonality doesn't matter to you, Alexander, and that you think that all cards should have about the same power level. Well, if that's okay, maybe this is cool. We haven't seen a sorcery put a creature from the graveyard to play for a long time, but that doesn't really mean it's not a common ability, I guess... especially since the recursion isn't guaranteed.

One of those cards that needs to be played with, I suppose. I am tempted to ask this, though: If you decided to make a black punisher card that did the same thing, would you increase the damage or decrease it's cost?

@jmgariepy First I would say that I think punisher is a red thing that doesn't belong in any other color. I also think that the nature of punisher is to get an effect cheaper than you would get it normally because of the damage trade off. So if I moved this to black I'd probably increase the cost to and leave the damage as is.

But punisher for black might fit better if it wasn't damage. Maybe something like, "Return target creature card from your graveyard to the battlefield unless a player chooses the creature he or she controls with the highest mana cost and sacrifices it." A little wordy, I know. But that's something I think is more in line with black punisher.