Especially in Commander, four life is easy to get and having a 4/4 blocker out of it is the icing on the cake
Other types of damage include combat damage
Ancient Mew was one of the first examples of this, and to this day, we still can't perfectly decipher what the card quite does
Lastly, Sphinx of the Final Word is a cool Control finisher, and I can see it having some play against Dimir and Golgari Midrange for various Control strategies in the near future
as a result, we fell all of the way into bannings when things went badly
The gameplan is simple: Cast Melek and for that sweet mana discount to cast more instants and sorceries Fill your graveyard with spells by casting, discarding, and self-milling so that Melek gets huge Punch people with your juiced-up commander for lethal or fling Melek at people's faces Because Melek, Reforged Researcher gives a whopping 3 mana discount on the first instant or sorcery spell we cast each turn, spells with that cost 3 generic mana become far stronger in our list, especially instants so we can take full advantage of Melek's once per turn discount
