Chain Reaction

The math is the trap. A symmetrical board wipe whose damage scales with the number of creatures sounds clean until you count: at four creatures it deals four to each, at six it deals six, and the threshold where it actually clears a developed board climbs exactly as the board does. The card is built to reward patience, killing nothing meaningful early and everything late, but the same scaling that makes it lethal against a wide field also makes it a dead card against a thin one. Where a fixed-damage sweeper like Pyroclasm or Anger of the Gods knows its number in advance, this one cedes that control to the opponent: they decide, by how many creatures they commit, how big your spell gets. That tension is the whole design. It is a wrath that the table builds for you, and it punishes the deck that over-extends while doing little against the deck that holds back. The quirk veterans learn is that it counts every creature on the battlefield, including your own, so the cleanest plays are the ones where you have kept your own side empty or where your survivors outsize the X you are about to deal. A sweeper that grows with the problem it is meant to solve is rarer than it looks, and the self-symmetry is the price of letting it scale.