Break Down the Door

Green has always paid the same tax for touching artifacts and enchantments: instant-speed answers like Naturalize and Disenchant do nothing if the opponent never presents a target, so against a clean board you are holding a dead card. The design move worth naming here is the third mode. When there is something worth exiling, this is disenchant with the upgrade from destroy to exile; when there is not, the manifest dread mode converts the same spell into a 2/2 body plus a two-card dig, seeding a face-down creature that can flip into something larger later. Modal removal usually degrades to a stranded card in exactly the matchups where the removal is irrelevant, and this hedges against that specific failure: you never draw a blank. The manifest dread line also quietly rewards decks packing creatures worth unmasking, since the 2/2 is a floor rather than a ceiling. The cost of all this flexibility is paid in the usual green currency: the exile modes ask for more mana than a bare two-mana disenchant, and the manifested creature arrives inert, worth only its stats until you pay to turn it face up. What changes, though, is the card's relationship to matchup variance. A spell that is always live, target or no target, is a fundamentally different object from an answer that sits dead in your hand waiting for permission to matter.