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Moxonomy

Bad Deal

Sorcery4 generic manaBlack manaBlack mana

The trouble with a symmetrical price tag on an asymmetrical effect is that the price stops being a cost and starts being a rounding error. Six mana buys card advantage, hand disruption, and a small life swing all at once: you draw two while each opponent sheds two, and the two life everyone loses is the closest thing to a downside on the card. In a duel that life clause is nearly free, since you are already trading their hand for your draws. Across a full table the effect skews harder in your favor, because the discard clips every opponent while the draws stay yours, and the shared two-life tax barely registers against a pod's worth of resources. This is a black draw-and-discard spell built to punish a wide board of players rather than to win a tight two-person race; the phrase "each opponent" is doing the heavy lifting, and its value scales with the number of hands it can reach into. Plenty of black card-advantage spells have paid a little life for a lot of grip, but most of them pointed their disruption at a single hand and priced themselves to compete in the efficient-value tier. Spreading the discard across the whole table is what pushes this out of that tier and into the slower, grindier register where six-mana sorceries live, where the payoff is measured against the number of opponents rather than the tempo of a single exchange.

Bad Deal (anb)
ANB · #45uncommon
Pricing
Normal: $0.23
Foil: $0.33
Oracle Text

Rules text

You draw two cards and each opponent discards two cards. Each player loses 2 life.
Legalities

Format Status

Standard
N/A
Pioneer
Legal
Modern
Legal
Legacy
Legal
Vintage
Legal
Commander
Legal
Pauper
N/A
Brawl
Legal
Historic
Legal
Alchemy
Legal
Timeless
Legal
Standard Brawl
N/A
More formats
Old School
N/A
Premodern
N/A
PreDH
N/A
Pauper Commander
N/A
Oathbreaker
Legal
Gladiator
Legal
Penny Dreadful
Legal
Duel Commander
Legal
Future Standard
N/A
COMPETITIVEBRAWL
Legal
TLR
N/A
Printings elsewhere

Other printings

2 sets
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