Dakmor Plague

A symmetrical sweeper that hits players as well as creatures, and that dual-damage clause is what gives the card its whole shape. This is black's take on a board reset built for the beginner-facing Portal product line, where the rules were stripped down and the card had to read clean: three damage to everything, no toughness math beyond that one number, no clever exceptions. Part of what you pay is your own life total, which is the friction that keeps it from being a free reset. You are paying five mana and three of your own life to clear a battlefield, so the card wants a board state where your opponent's creatures matter more to them than three life does to you, or a position where the three points of reach to the face is the actual payoff. That player-damage rider quietly turns a sweeper into a closer: the board clear and the burn arrive in the same sorcery, which is rare for an effect costed at this level. The Portal sets traded power for legibility, and Dakmor Plague is a tidy example of what that tradeoff produced: an effect a contemporary black sweeper would express with toughness thresholds and selective wording, rendered here as a single flat number applied to the whole table.