You Make the Card: Soul Swap

For those who don't already know, the fourth You Make the Card has been and is currently underway, and so far, the Magic: The Gathering community has decided to create a black enchantment. The deadline is now past for submitting rules text, and Wizards is currently going to whittle down the submissions to the best usable ones for all of us to eventually vote on.

For now, we wait, and while we wait, I'm sharing with you my submission for You Make the Card. First, I want to say I'm aware of the high chance of it being rejected due to rules issues or complexity. Here it is:

Here's a breakdown of the card:

• "You and the chosen player each control the other.": Both Mindslaver and Sorin Markov exist and let you be able to control a player for one turn. This enchantment lets you control a player permanently at the cost of giving up control of your own body. This card is within black's color pie due to the philosophy of "power at any cost."
• "take an extra turn after this one": This text exists because, when you switch control with the other player, that player effectively loses his or her next turn. In a two-player game, that can lead to some lame gameplay. At least this extra turn can give the other player the "fair" amount of turns to un-lame-ify the dilemma they're in.
• "if exactly one of you or the chosen player": This condition of "exactly one" is here because I want to prevent a potential infinite loop of losing by having each player lose at the same time except have it replaced by making the other player lose instead which then triggers the swap of losses again, and etc. But, to be clear, I'm not sure whether an infinite loop could happen if I didn't have this text here. Better safe than sorry!
• "exchange life totals": This effect is here because of this scenario - Arthur (controlled by Brad) is at 0 life, and Brad (controlled by Arthur) is at 7 life. The game's state-based effects would then try to cause Arthur (controlled by Brad) to lose the game. Instead, Soul Swap would cause Brad (controlled by Arthur) to lose the game. Then you're left with just Arthur (now back under Arthur's control). Except Arthur is still at 0 life. The game's state-based effects would then try again to cause Arthur to lose the game. This time, because Brad doesn't exist anymore, Arthur would just lose. This is not a desirable outcome. Thus, I put in "exchange life totals" so that Arthur would be able to keep on living with that 7 life Brad (who Arthur used to be in control of) had.
• "exile Soul Swap": This is here because otherwise it would be awkward if Arthur in the previous example had cast this spell, then defeated his own body (controlled by Brad), and then regained control of his own body with 7 life and STILL had Soul Swap, even with Brad being out of the game. It would sit there and do nothing. Best to get rid of it, especially so that we'd like to make it not too easy to just return this enchantment back to your hand with a blue spell just so you can recast it again.
• 298 Characters: The submission form for submitting the rules text had a limitation of 300 characters. Because of this, I had to perform some character-saving tricks. Because we needed to provide a Playtest Name, I wanted to use the card's Playtest Name within the rules text instead of the usual "CARDNAME" placeholder that is there until the card's name is finalized. And due that decision, "Soul Swap" was a short enough name to keep the character count down. Note that "Soul Switch" wouldn't have worked! "Sacrifice Soul Swap" would have put the rules text at too many characters, so I went with "exile Soul Swap." Lastly, due to the 298 characters being reached, there was nothing else I could do for this card besides what you see above.

I realize I may have sabotaged my attempts at winning You Make the Card with a design that isn't "safe," but I decided I wanted to "go big." If my design doesn't get picked as one of the final submissions up for voting, then so be it. But if it does... man, it's going to be one heck of a card!

Many thanks to Jules Robins and Evan Jones for giving me critique and/or suggestions for my card design before I submitted. The general advice was on the card's downfalls of being confusing/complex. But you could say I'm being stubborn.