Land of Wind and Edges

dougbeyermtg:

Cards change zones a lot more in the game than characters change life-states in the story. We haven’t allowed someone to just pay B to Disentomb Yawgmoth in the story — but you also couldn’t have paid W to Path to Exile him. It just takes more than that. (It took Urza many books more than…

There is also the detail that a summoned creature is not the original thing, and note that we don’t really have spells that resurrect players at the moment.

Alternate flavor theory: Magic’s many resurrection spells are made to overcome a certain metaphysical “quantity” of death, and when there is too much weight on a character’s passing, it’s that much harder to revert. So a summoned beast, which has no friends, lovers, social ties, or even history, is easily returned. A dead person, especially one long-dead, with everything involved in their death, burial, passage, et al: That’s harder.