Debt to the Deathless

The drain spell with the multiplier built in. Most life-loss effects scale one-to-one with the mana you sink into them: pay X, drain X. The doubling clause here breaks that ratio, so every point of X swings the gap by four against a single opponent (two lost, two gained back), and that gap widens with each additional player on the receiving end. The double-white, double-black cost is the discipline that pays for the math: this is not a splash, it demands a committed Orzhov base before X ever gets large enough to matter. The card asks for exactly the deckbuilding it rewards, which is mana acceleration and big colorless production, because the spell does nothing meaningful until X climbs into territory where doubled drain becomes lethal. That gating is deliberate. Resolve it with X at one or two and you have spent four-plus mana to nudge a single life total; resolve it with twenty floating and it ends games in a single cast. The lifegain rider is not incidental either: the swing back to your own total is often the difference between surviving the turn you tapped out and dying to the costs you paid to ramp this high in the first place. A finisher whose ceiling is set entirely by how much mana you can muster, and whose floor is honest about it: at X equals zero, it is a blank, and it never pretends otherwise.