Dakkon Blackblade

This guy's supremely iconic. I'm certain that, if he hadn't been reprinted in "Chronicles: The Dreamcrushening" (few know of the set's subtitle), he'd be worth well north of $50 right now. (That's the magic of old Magic cards -- everyone knows Juzam Djinn is unplayable, but because there's only a few thousand running around, no one can get their hands on one of the nostalgia-inducing bastards for less than a few C-notes. If there weren't a billionty white-border Dakkons running around, he'd be in the same boat.)

The card itself is another hot mess, though. See, black, white and blue aren't the color of land ramp. This guy wants lots of lands. See the problem already? It's deeper than that, though. As a trio, they're the color of control. Control wants big finishers -- ah ha, you might say, Dakkon's massive! Well, slow down there Cinderella; before you get all starry-eyed, note that he's got no evasion. That's the core of what makes a good finisher, its ability to actually finish the game. Dakkon gets stopped by every kobold that stumbles into his path; not exactly an inspiring game-ender.

But the problems don't stop there. Dakkon was a planeswalker without a soul; his sword was created as part of a pact between him and another planeswalker. (Before you shake your head about how idiotic it would be to have players summoning old-school planeswalkers, the card represents Dakkon before he was risen to planeswalker status and then kinda-sorta killed.) Blackblade -- his namesake sword -- was so powerful because it drained souls. The connection to lands is totally clear now -- without lands, there'd be no mana to tap for Buried Alive to feed Dakkon. It all makes sense now!

In any case, the fix is easy:

He faces many of the same problems, mechanically speaking, as his predecessor, but note that a) red's far more likely to sacrifice its dudes than white is; b) he's focused on black now, rather than blue; and c) his flavor matches the card. It's not a perfect match -- when black recurs duders from the graveyard, it represents reanimating them as soulless zombies, implying that Dakkon got to keep the souls -- but it's better. Something more complicated could look like this:

Why not make him a Sengir Vampire variant? A few reasons -- the first being the petty, of course. I just don't like the sengir ability. The "real" reasons are a little more complicated. First, the sengir ability requires a decent-sized body; Dakkon is a regular human who has an amazing sword. It feels weird to have him start out with a huge front end and the requisite rear-end so he could live long enough to trigger the ability. Second, there are some supremely minor memory issues with sengir ability -- but they're memory issues nonetheless and I don't care for them. Finally, while the sengir ability is thematically black, it's mechanically green. Black doesn't typically care about high toughness -- a requisite for the sengir ability -- but green does. Black doesn't want to be on the defensive -- where the sengir ability works best -- but green doesn't mind as much. Black has a strong unblockability suite in flying and fear (erm, intimidate) and the sengir ability doesn't mesh well with those -- but it plays very nicely with green's go-to evasion, trample.