From the set FAQ for Journey Into Nyx
http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/faq/jou


Ritual of the Returned
Exile target creature card from your graveyard. Put a black Zombie creature token onto the battlefield. Its power is equal to that card's power and its toughness is equal to that card's toughness.

Originally posted by FAQ:

Use the creature card's power and toughness as it last existed in the graveyard to determine the power and toughness of the Zombie token.

Deicide
Exile target enchantment. If the exiled card is a God card, search its controller's graveyard, hand, and library for any number of cards with the same name as that card and exile them, then that player shuffles his or her library.

Originally posted by FAQ:

Deicide looks at the card in exile, not the permanent that was exiled, to determine if it is a God. For each of the Gods in the Theros block, it won't matter what your devotion to its color(s) was. The card is a God card when not on the battlefield.

Why are these different? They both move a particular type of card to exile, but then Deicide examines what the card looks like after moving the card to exile, but Ritual of the Returned examines it prior?

To use a specific example: if the only card in any graveyard is a single Tarmogoyf in my graveyard, and I cast Ritual of the Returned on it, do I get a 1/2 zombie, or a 0/1 zombie.

Edited Aaron Henner (May 2, 2014 06:07:21 AM)

Because they're different cards with different texts. Deicide tells you to exile the target enchantment, then checks to see if the exiled card is a god. Since it's talking about the exiled card, it's looking at the card as it exists in exile, not on the battlefield.

With the Ritual, since it doesn't say otherwise, we look at how the card looked in the graveyard, not how it looks in exile. So we look at the power and toughness of the creature card as it existed in the graveyard (for a similar situation, consider scavenge. Scavenge also cares about the power of the card in the graveyard, not in exile. Here's a thread about scavenge from earlier: http://apps.magicjudges.org/forum/topic/4067/). In the Tarmogoyf example, the Tarmogoyf was a 1/2 when it was last in the graveyard, so you'll get a 1/2 tokens, not a 0/1 token.

Nathan Long
Wizards.Com Boards NetRep