Personal Incarnation

An Alpha experiment in cost-as-flavor that the modern game has almost entirely abandoned. The design conceit is that this Avatar is literally tied to its summoner's body: damage routed off it lands on you, and when it dies you lose half your life. Richard Garfield was sketching a category of cards where the player and the permanent share a health pool, with the activated ability functioning as a manual redirection valve (a feature so unusual that the rules text has to explicitly restrict who can press the button). The math is brutal in both directions. Six mana for a 6/6 was a premium rate in 1993, and the redirection lets you protect the body against a finisher by paying life in single-point increments; but the death clause means trading it off is never clean, halving your life every time the creature hits the graveyard. The wrinkle is that destruction is not the only way out: bounce returns the creature to hand without it dying, sidestepping the life loss entirely, so the punishing clause only fires on the routes that actually kill it. The card's real importance is the design lineage it anchors: the "you and your creature share consequences" thread that runs through Lich and Transcendence. Wizards stopped printing the raw version of this effect very quickly, because a permanent that punishes its own owner for losing it creates feel-bad blowouts the modern color pie routes around rather than into.