Kefka, Court Mage // Kefka, Ruler of Ruin

Symmetrical discard hides an asymmetric engine, and the payoff clause is where the design lives: everyone pitches a card, but only the controller draws, and the draw scales to how many distinct card types landed in the pile rather than the raw count. A random mutual discard is a wash; here, a mismatched heap of a land, a creature, and an instant becomes a fistful of cards, so the reward is bounded by diversity, not volume. The entry-or-attack trigger means the 4/5 body wants to be in the red zone, doing both jobs at once. The eight-mana sorcery-speed activation is deliberately steep and rewards a game that has already tilted your way: pay it, and each opponent gives up a permanent while the card flips into a windmill whose flying is almost incidental.

That flip changes the axis entirely. The back face converts any life an opponent loses during your turn into cards drawn, one for one, so a single crackback attack or a burn spell reads as a refill. The two halves compound: draw more, deploy more, hit for more, draw more. The front is patient, capped card advantage; the back is a runaway punish for a board you already own. The escalation is written into the ability sets themselves, court-mage schemer on one face and nihilist ruler on the other, with the transform cost functioning as the point of no return between them.