For Challenge # 043 obviously riffing on Archangel's Light.

Cool card, but maybe a little too strong. I remember LSV saying in an episode of Magic TV that he thought Archangel's Light would be very strong at 6 mana and would go well in an Esper Control shell, both for a value Feldon's Cane effect while also stabilizing against aggressive decks. For just 1 more mana, you're getting a 5/5 flying lifelinking body, which is a huge upgrade.

It's playable, certainly, but I really think it's far from overpowered. Especially as a mythic. Looks like a good Timmy/Spike card to me.

For 1 more mana you can get Sphinx of the Steel Wind, which is bigger and has far more abilities. It doesn't give you the immediate life pump, but it's far sturdier in combat and against burn/shatter/naturalize. And that was borderline-unplayable in its day.

I'd say it easily outclasses Sphinx of the Steel Wind, both to hard-cast and as a reanimation target. To hard-cast, this is single-colored and cheaper, and also it has a strong ETB trigger if your goal is to stabilize. With Sphinx, if they've just got a Swords to Plowshares or a Day of Judgment, you've gained nothing from Sphinx. It's a similar reason as to why Griselbrand is the new dominant reanimation target in Legacy -- even if you can deal with my huge flying lifelinker, as long as I've got more than 7 life, I've already gotten a ton of value. And I believe this would also replace Blazing Archon most of the time as your other anti-aggro reanimation target of choice, since it sort of has a similar effect on the game, except again you can't just Path to Exile this thing and crash in for lethal. And let's not forget, it also just shuffled back in all your Careful Studys and Reanimates.

There's another reason to fear this card at 7, and it's the reason that Wizards costed Archangel's Light at 8, and I don't think it's because they thought that card should actually cost 8. If you think about it, this is potentially a very scary effect in terms of the health of Magic as a game. If a card like this were to become one of the best cards to play, then all of a sudden you have a lot of Magic games that will never end. The best way you can ensure that Magic games end quickly is by printing a lot of good aggressive cards, and not a lot of good defensive cards. In order to be sure that Magic games will end, life totals should be more likely to hit 0 than not, and libraries should be more likely to become empty than not. This card makes it harder for -both- of those things to happen, and that's why they wanted to make sure Archangel's Light never became tournament playable... infinite draws due to timeout is good for nobody, including the popularity of Magic.