Fulmer, Rebel Hellspawn

So, I'm not entirely sure if Fulmer is meant for the Overgrowth set. If so, he's definitely meant to raise the stakes of the conflict. Perhaps he had some demon blood in his family tree and in the midst of this some sort of confrontation with troops from The Arbor, his spark triggers.

He was originally thought up as an actual Rakdos planeswalker from Ravnica. I wasn't playing back then and didn't follow the story, but apparently several Rakdos cult members actually drank the demon's blood and consumed him? I have an idea that perhaps Fulmer was one of them, or was the child of one of them, and sparked to become a planeswalker that can turn into a demon.

Mechanically the point of this card is to experiment with a red-black planeswalker that feels on color without succumbing to the typical planeswalker style, which I'm starting to feel like doesn't work for these two colors. When red and black play together, they're 100 percent aggression, destructiveness, and speed. There's no defense. There's no protection. So the natural concept that a planeswalker needs to be able to protect itself doesn't fit. Even the idea of "loyalty" seems wrong.

But when you take that stuff away, a planeswalker feels less like a planeswalker and more like an enchantment creature combo with a very short life span. So I thought about how I could make a planeswalker that was extremely impactful but also pushed for riskier play styles. Here's what I came up with after iterating on him for a while:

Ergh. Yeah, lots of text, lol. Fulmer isn't the first planeswalker to only minus, or even the only R/B one. Sarkhon Vol the Mad didn't have any way to gain loyalty counters either.

But Fulmer's emblem really changes the way he operates as a planeswalker. So you can ult him immediately and send him to the graveyard, only to return him next turn. But if you're truly either desperate or confident, you can activate his other skills. If you've got mulitples of this guy in your deck. You can always ult the second Fulmer you play. And then you can bring back either of them.

It's a high-stakes risk, though. I imagine pretty much every player is going to ult him immediately, lest he get hit with damage or removal before doing anything.

I really like the concept behind him because RB planeswalkers are so very hard to conceptualize. The big question is whether he's actually balanced. Or even playable.