Stories are told to newer players about "the Black Summer" when Necropotence took over and the light of Magic was blocked out as Black was literally the deck to be played. There is nothing which can be said to compare it to today's battlefield except maybe to compare it to the reign of Skullclamp and Affinity. Tarmogoyf isn't even comparable to Necropotence because you can splash Tarmogoyf where Necropotence had to be the centerpiece of your deck.

I made a comment about how Necropotence today would risk wrecking Magic, much as Affinity did before Wizards got it back under control. Lee and I joked about it coming back in Shadowmoor since the theming worked, but it would scare the bejeezus out of me if it did return. That card is, at its core, pure hemi power.

It's all well and good for me to say something like that, but I don't think many new players fully understand why this card is so revered and so powerful.

It is an engine. You convert one game resource directly into another. This is a risky type of card for R&D to produce as it is begging to be abused. If we (players) are given the ability to make such a conversion, it should be limited or extremely expensive. Just as Alchemy is a dream for science, to do the impossible with no cost in energy or resources. Necropotence was alchemy, dark alchemy. Consider Dark Confidant, a card which came around more nearly a decade later. It captured the same concept, exchanging life for cards, but it hurt you more per card (possibly) and it limited you to only one per turn.

Necropotence was also powerful because of when it came around. Sure combos had been seen before, but the engine it provided was so far above and more powerful than anything before it, it was a new type of beast the likes of which not even R&D had seen before. They had no idea the beast they were unleashing in the metagame. I would dare say none of them expected players to willingly spend ten life to draw ten cards at a time, but when players did they discovered that the lost life was well worth the cards they got in exchange.

R&D today is composed of Pro Players, Economists, Mathematicians and game designers. R&D back when Ice Age came out was different in just about any way, much smaller, much less experienced, and Ice Age as a block was completely new to them as they began exploring the ideas of a big set with another attached to it (Alliances.) They explored lots of new design space in Ice Age, cards without cost (Force of Will for example.) Necropotence was, in their mind, I think a card for the Johnny players (though the Johnny name hadn't been coined yet.) It was a card designed to be silly and used in combos, but what they quickly discovered was akin to the discovery shown on Jurassic Park when the dinosaurs began to take over the island.

Yet another element of the perfect storm that was Necropotence was the birth of the Internet as a medium for game study. The Dojo was there, chat rooms and the earliest forms of online play were just coming into use as Necropotence was unleashed and through this new academic setting the game theory exploded in a black fireball across the metagame.

It truly was a perfect storm, so many elements played into this deck's genesis all of which allowed it to dominate the format like none before it.

After Necropotence Wizards R&D studied what had happened and discovered the power of engines. The problem is that since Magic is so complex it is still possible for engines to be born in ways R&D overlooks. Take the untap costs in Shadowmoor, when I discovered them doing this my immediate fear was the simple possibility of an engine. Based on the cards I see in the set R&D had the same fear and rigorously tested for it.

However what Engine did come about from Shadowmoor? You should know the answer to this, we've had not one but two articles discussing it. Swans of Bryn Argoll.

Swans of Bryn Argoll - It converts damage to itself into card drawing for your opponent.

The Seismic Assault combo has again threatened Wizards for bringing an engine into the metagame. Is the deck the new Necropotence? No. Hands down, end of story. Period. Necropotence had much more raw power in a single card as opposed to a two or three card combo. The combo is still powerful and it's drawing a lot of attention because it seems like a combo deck which could be format defining for Standard. I'm not saying the combo isn't powerful, the real strength is yet to be seen, that is a question only the format metagame can answer.

No, we won't be seeing the tyrannical return of Necropotence. Wizards is working hard to make it so that The DCI does not have to ban any cards, in R&Ds eyes I'm sure they see a banning in either Standard or Block as a failure on some level. Though they seem to enter previously unstable realms of design space with a gleeful gleam in their eye they are more mature and more thorough in their exploration. Patrick Chapin, in ManaNationRadio 2 pointed out that R&D is composed of some of the best Pro players of all time and by using their understanding of the game R&D has a much stronger engine of its own to convert resources, namely ideas into cards.