Daily Card Redesign #143: Necropotence

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.

Ah, Necropotence. The enabler of that famed Black Summer that was before my time.

Redesign:

I never figured out who or what is depicted within the art of Necropotence. Is that supposed to be what a planeswalker looks like when they're powerful in the ways of death magic? Or is that Death itself with its hand granting you its services?

I decided I liked the fact that the subject represents Death. And the hand raised with swirly magical effect is your soul being taken by Death. I wanted to go for a flavor that had you making a deal or contract with Death to help you out of dying. In exchange, your soul.

I wanted to capture the flavor of what it meant to be a planeswalker without a soul. But, in the end, I decided on this simple effect above. You get to take just one more turn of yours before losing. In exchange, you're protected until then.

I have no idea what the appropriate mana cost should be. So I made it the same cost as a Time Warp. It's essentially granting you an extra turn - since you were supposed to lose before you got the chance to have that additional turn.

By the way, wondering about a planeswalker losing its soul made me wonder what it'd be like to sacrifice or otherwise lose your spark. Do you die? Or do you become an ordinary creature?