You need to have it in your hand before activating its ability, but if you do, and you can play it in the next few turns, your opponent will have no chance of surviving
There is a veritable mandelbrot set of tangents to go off on already
Doubling Season Showcase In case you were questioning the usefulness of Doubling Season and how much players would want to get their hands on it, even the non-foil showcase made the list
In previous articles, I've listed out all of them individually here
Still, there are some general traits I look for in a Create Undead target: ETB and death/LTB abilities are the #1 priority
Rakdos Scam thrives off of Evoking elementals as early as turn one, hitting their bodies with a reborn effect like this one before they die, and reanimating them to get a body and two ETB triggers for zero mana