Welcome back to Name That Card! I thought about theming this card with diamonds, but that would have been a top down design, and it would have encouraged everyone to use 'diamond words' in the name. It's tough constantly doing bottom up design!

Anyhow, I wanted to keep digging into the mechanic we stumbled across last week. My intention was to make a common version, but I thought this was more interesting, so I stuck with this. Problem: I think this card is broken. It's a better card to cascade into than Ancestral Vision, and that's probably not a good sign. But let's pretend it isn't broken. What's its name?

­Moment of Death

Is an interesting mechanic. I'm not sure how good the card is -- obviously it's outstanding if you can bypass 0 costs or if you're playing a deck that relies on staying at a low life cost, but it's unusable any other time, if you cast it you'll probably be dead before you can cast any of the cards you drew.

Might be nicer if it got affordable below 10 life or similar, maybe making the mana value equal to your life total all the time to avoid cascade, but I don't know if that works with the mechanic concept

I don't know a lot about magic anymore, but if Death's Shadow is a good card (IIRC it was/is one of the best modern/vintage decks?), shouldn't this also be?

From my understanding, older formats are basically blitz mode, where it doesn't matter if your life total is low, because there isnt really a concept of chip damage, as the best decks are optimized enough to kill you on turn two, if not on turn one sometimes.

In standard, I think this would be even stronger, since even if it's a powerful effect, it doesn't really win you the game like death's shadow might, so probably wouldn't even fit into a self-harm deck in older formats.

TLDR: Seems overpowered, but I like it TBH.

As for a name, what about Perilous Investigation and it could be a Dimir-flavored card, since they are the multiverse's equivalent of a spy noir film.

Another cool name with a similar theme could be Treacherous Realization!

Or Contemplate Mortality

Yeah, I really don't know competitive formats! And I know vintage and legacy less well. I agree that's a more likely home for it. But I'm still not sure it would be worthwhile. Death's Shadow you can play when you have ~10 life and then it will get better if you sacrifice your life after. NTC75 you can only really play for an advantage once you're already down to three life or so, and even then it uses all your mana up, so you don't have a chance to play something that will actually win. But I'm really bad at interpreting older formats, usually something unexpected is good! :)

People are evaluating this for suicide, but it's a reasonable card for W/B or maybe U/B control as well. The idea behind those decks is to let your opponent waste energy knocking you down to maybe three life, then stabilizing and locking the board. Being able to draw four cards for cheap in the late mid-game is ideal for what that deck is trying to do. Alternatively, any good combo deck that just needs the one round to go off after they got pummeled for three rounds would find this card useful. And if your opponent isn't beating you down when you're playing combo, you probably already won.

That said, I keep thinking to myself that maybe I should have added "Cycling " to this card. I feel like Black is supposed to have painful to work around cards, but this one might be too painful. As I noticed, when writing the worst cards according to Gatherer article, the cards that people really didn't like were cards that stacked one drawback on top of another. This card almost feels like that. You get to 5 life, and it's a reasonable spell, but that doesn't feel like that was good enough, considering this card is as dead as a Rhystic Syphon, in the wrong conditions.

When I first read it, I thought it was "draw X cards". That would make it niche but less dead at X>5 (but sadly less good at X<3).

I find it amazing that I did not think of that option. XD

Edit: Though, I'm pretty sure I did, because that's the direction I came from. I just came across 'draw 4 cards', liked the dynamic of a tipping point, and promptly forgot where I came from.

I don't think "equal to life" version is better than the "draw 4" version, I think it needs to be some hybrid to be attractive throughout. Maybe "cost X, draw X, X = life total/3?" or something, although I'm not sure that really works.

Foolish Magic

This is homage to Tarot major arcana.

Relate your life as equivalent to your age. Less life, younger age; more life, older age.

The Fool represents the tabula rasa of a newborn. Since babies are able and willing to learn at much faster rate than adults. Thus 'twould cost more for adults to relearn, retrain.

Voting is up! Click here to choose your favorite card name!

Congratulations Jack! And I'll see you all again on (((NTC #076)))!