Brush with Death

A study in how Buyback misprices the worst kind of effect. The drain itself is trivial: two life each way is the rate you would find on a cantrip-free common, the sort of spell that fills a flavor slot more than a deck. But Buyback, the mechanic built to turn one-shot spells into recurring engines, priced the recursion against the spell's ceiling rather than its floor. Here the floor is so low that no recursion premium makes the loop worthwhile: paying four extra mana to return a four-life swing is the kind of math that only resolves favorably across many turns, and a card asking for that much patience needs a payoff that climbs faster than two life per cast. The design lesson is that Buyback works when the base spell already wants to be cast repeatedly (a bounce, a removal piece, a token-maker) and curdles when it is bolted onto an effect with no inherent reason to recur. This is the latter: a marginal drain wearing the most expensive recursion clause around, where the clause has nothing worth repeating to attach to.