Eschew Materials + Animate Dead = No corpse requied?

[RoboEmperor]

Is it? I'm sick of waiting until level 15 to get my undead dragons. Corpses are technically less than 1gp.

[hamishspence]

It's not the Material Component of the spell though - it's the target of the spell.

[tyckspoon]

^that. Eschew Materials would let you skip the onyx cost. Or would, if it were cheap, but it's annoyingly expensive.

There are a number of ways to get arbitrary corpses in D&D without waiting for Poly Any Object, tho. Stone To Flesh turns statuary into a corpse, so you can do something like Wall of Stone > Fabricate (possibly including a skill-boosting spell to create a statue of sufficient quality and detail to ensure you get the desired kind of corpse) > Stone to Flesh > Animate your ex nihilo corpse (this is also one of the ways to try doing ethical necromancy if you want to try selling your DM on that idea.) Or Planar Bind a (Celestial/Fiendish/other elemental/outer-planar) version of whatever you want and kill it, then animate it; the planes contain Outsider versions of basically everything somewhere (this is just straight up evil, but it works.)

[RoboEmperor]

Right... thanks. Target of the spell, not material component.
I know about stone to flesh but that thing is restricted to medium sized corpses only. Anything bigger requires several castings, which require some DM leniency.