Cleansing Beam

The flagship demonstration of Radiance, the ability word that reads the color of your target and spreads the effect to every other creature sharing it. Pointed at a red creature, this hits every red creature in play, friend or foe, and the symmetry is rarely an accident: the caster usually has the smaller red board, or none at all. What looks like a single-target burn spell is really a one-sided sweeper, and the puzzle is choosing a target whose color blankets the opponent's side while sparing yours. Against a monocolored deck it scales into a full wrath as their commitment deepens; against a multicolor board you pick the color that costs them the most bodies. The 2 damage ceiling keeps it from being an unconditional answer: it clears tokens and small creatures rather than fatties, the price the ability pays for hitting an unbounded number of targets at once. Radiance never recurred, so the cards built on it form a closed set of curiosities, and this is the one most worth understanding. It forces the caster to read the board by color rather than by individual threat, a targeting demand most removal never makes.