Undying Flames

Epic was a keyword built around a single, deliberately reckless promise: cast this once, then watch it copy itself every upkeep while you sit on a frozen hand. The trade is total. You lock yourself out of every other spell you own, and the design tension is whether that ongoing engine can outrun the fact that you've stopped developing your own game. Most of the cycle resolved that tension with a known quantity, a fixed effect you could count on each turn. This one bolted the recursion onto a variable instead, dealing damage equal to the mana value of whatever nonland card it digs up. That makes the engine a gamble layered on a gamble: you've already sworn off your hand, and then each copy's payoff is decided by what your library coughs up. A six-mana-value hit is a haymaker; a one-mana-value whiff is a wasted upkeep you can never get back, with no way to fix the deck mid-game because you can't cast anything to refill or filter. The honest read is that the variance is the point, not a flaw in it: it asks you to build a top-heavy library where the random nonland card is reliably expensive, then commit to that math permanently. Where most damage spells let you aim and forget, this one bets the game on the quality of your own deck and never lets you reconsider.