CotW #420: I couldn't think of a name: Phyrexian Edition

A new idea comparing to my previous entry.

I'm not saying to change the card, but it might be worth considering that spending 2 life instead of 1 mana is not viewed as a detriment. In fact that sort of effect has historically been known to break the game, in particular relevance being phyrexian mana itself being known as a very much broken mechanic precisely because it's such a good trade-off.

Again, absolutely not telling you to change the card, though I might recommend taking into consideration that this could easily be seen as a 3 mana 4/4 that makes each opponent lose 6 life and then deals 6 damage to any target (including potentially your opponent, making a total loss of over half their initial life by turn 3 with this card alone). That you can play in any color. It might be you're going for a "do what you would want to do anyway" kind of effect, but the design gives me the impression that it was thinking of the life loss as a big sacrifice here, which to my understanding in practice it doesn't tend to be, not to the extent to justify those bonuses.

Well, I'm not exactly an expert, so feel free to take my comments with a pinch of salt. But I'll leave this food for thought.

Yeah, it's not uncommon for magic cards to have effects that encourage you to do things that are good anyway, think for instance the Landfall mechanic. Atonement isn't a bad mechanic inherently but its power and the power of phyrexian man a need to be taken more properly into account.

The three main points I think you need to balance around are that the card as it is:
----> Can effectively be seen as costing 3 mana
----> Does not require any particular color to be played
----> Is hyper-aggressive. Even without the last ability three of these are aggressively costed relatively big bodies, and leave your opponent a shock away from death (unless you're paying commander, but in that case each one is taking a total of 18 life and your loss of 6 life is even less significant).

My personal suggestion, don't pair something like Atonement with a lot of phyrexian mana, so an easy thing you can do that patches a lot of the issue is trading one of that phyrexian mana in the cost for a regular mana in the cost. Then the card is already bound to at least 1 color, you bumped the effective cost 4 and you've made the life loss incurred with atonement far more reasonable. It'll likely still need more tweaks from there, but I think it would be a big help. But of course, don't feel forced to take my suggestions! That's all it is, a suggestion, and ultimately as I mentioned before I'm hardly an expert and this is your design.

I appreciate the feedback! I changed Atonement to just mean "Whenever you spend life to cast a card, [effect]" and rebalanced the mana cost, I think it's a bit more reasonable now.