Angel of the Dire Hour
Most one-sided board wipes ask you to pay a tax for the asymmetry, but this one extracts the payment from your opponent's turn structure instead. The exile clause only fires when you cast it from your hand, a leash that shuts down what would otherwise be a free Settle the Wreckage stapled to a flyer: no reanimation shortcut, no blink-engine loop, no flicker to re-trigger the wrath. Flash converts it from a sweeper into a trap. You hold up seven mana, let the opponent commit to a profitable-looking attack, then drop the Angel during their declare-attackers step and exile the entire assault before combat damage. Exile rather than destruction means indestructible attackers and death-trigger value engines are answered cleanly, and the creatures are gone for good instead of waiting in a graveyard. The cost of all this is timing discipline: the board is only cleared of attacking creatures, so a patient opponent who simply declines to swing leaves the trigger with nothing to do, and you are left with a 5/4 flyer that cost seven mana. It punishes the alpha strike, not the durdle. That makes it a fundamentally reactive design, a card that wants to be the reason an opponent regrets reading your open mana as a bluff.


