Season of Loss

Five points of currency, three effects priced at one, two, and three points, and permission to buy the same mode more than once: that structure is the design idea worth stopping on. Instead of a fixed spread of options, this hands you a dial. Five forced edicts if you want to grind a go-wide board off the table; a stack of card draw scaled to a turn full of dead creatures; a lethal drain sized to a stocked graveyard. The modes chain within a single cast, and knowing the order they resolve is the skill the card asks for. Spend a point on the edict (yours can be a token you were happy to lose), and every creature that died under your control that turn feeds the two-point draw mode. Buy that draw mode twice for four points and each purchase counts the same deaths again, so a turn with several bodies dying compounds fast. The three-point drain then scales to the creature cards your graveyard holds, which the earlier modes help fill. The pricing is what caps the ceiling: at five points the drain can only be bought once, and you will always have two points left over to spend elsewhere, so no single line runs away with the whole card. A black attrition payoff that makes you commit, as you cast it, to exactly which axis of the game you intend to win.