Barren Glory

The win condition that reads like a paradox to satisfy: hold no cards, control nothing else, and survive to your upkeep. Most alternate-win designs from this era asked you to accumulate something (a graveyard stacked with creatures, a life total climbed past a threshold); this one inverts the whole genre by demanding subtraction. The engineering problem is exquisite. You have to reach zero permanents and zero cards by your own upkeep, which means clearing every land and every other permanent you control, then passing with an empty grip into your opponent's turn defended only by an enchantment they may not be able to interact with. The hard part is the lands: most board wipes leave them standing, and so does discarding your hand, so the usual approach pairs a discard-everything outlet with something that destroys your other nonland permanents and a way to crack or sacrifice your lands too, all sequenced so the upkeep check fires before any draw step refills your grip. It is the rare card whose difficulty is the entire point: a six-mana enchantment that does nothing until you have voluntarily reduced yourself to nothing, every accumulation-based victory turned on its head into a victory by total subtraction. The result is a puzzle box, a card that exists less to be played than to be solved.