Daily Card Redesign #123: Tetsuo Umezawa

Daily Card Redesign is a daily Magic: The Gathering design exercise where I randomly choose a card for the scenario of it being killed late during its own set's development. I design a replacement card that uses the same art, is the same color, is the same rarity, and has a name that, alphabetically, keeps it within the same collector number for the set.

"TETSUUOOOOOOOOO!!!!"

So, this Tetsuo Umezawa is a pretty cool dude. First of all, he shares the same name as that one guy from the movie Akira. Secondly, he is a descendant of THE Toshiro "Toshi" Umezawa, the man who played a key role in ending the war in Kamigawa. AND This Tetsuo dude fought and defeated Nicol Bolas (well, supposedly - until Wizards brought him back to life or something that may be related to retconning into the form we know and love now).

So, I had a tricky challenge I set for myself. I wanted to have Tetsuo be able to destroy not only the legendary creature version of Bolas but the planeswalker one as well. But this card is in the Legends set, which was way before planeswalkers were invented. But blue-black-red can't destroy any kind of permanent (it can't destroy enchantments). Plus, it's out of flavor for Tetsuo to be able to destroy artifacts and lands in addition to creatures.

So the below redesign is what I came up with for being tricky with rules templating. But I'm afraid I might be cheating a little bit. Do you have a better solution for the one I came up with below?

Anyway, redesign:

Its important to note that the spell needs to have dealt damage to the planeswalker already. The effect can't just replace a spell that WOULD deal damage to a planeswalker - because spells target players and then later are decided upon by the controller of the spell whether the damage is dealt to any planeswalkers.

The effect is blue-black-red because black and red can destroy creatures and planeswalkers. And blue seems like the type of color to hack the effects of spells (like it does with changing color words in the text of spells). Though, yes, what's happening here is that it lets you do a direct damage spell actually hit the target, then Tetsuo does the finishing blow. Each of your direct damage spells finishes off creatures and planeswalkers as long as an untapped non-summoning sick Tetsuo and UBR mana are around.