Promise of Power

The two modes draw on the same resource from opposite directions. Drawing five and losing five life is black's old life-for-cards bargain at a proactive clip, refilling your hand in a single cast. The Demon mode reads that same hand and converts its contents into a flying body whose size you set by how many cards you are willing to keep. There is a built-in friction: the draw mode hands you exactly the fuel the Demon wants, but split apart you cannot spend that fuel both ways. Take the cards and you have passed on the threat that would have used them; build the Demon and you have left the card advantage on the table. Entwine is the clause that refuses to choose: pay the extra four, draw your five, then size the token off the hand you just stocked, so the Demon arrives roughly as large as the cards you drew. The full package climbs to nine mana, and that ceiling is what keeps the all-in line from being free. It comes out of an era of black sorceries that treated life total as a tempo resource to be spent down, and the entwine cost is what lifts it above flexible filler: most turns you take one half, but the games worth remembering are the ones where you had the mana for both and turned a fresh fistful of cards into a single enormous flier.