Darkness Descends

A symmetrical sweeper that never destroys anything, and that gap between shrinking and killing shapes everything the card does. Where a board wipe marks creatures for the graveyard, this shaves two toughness off every body and leaves the survivors standing: creatures with two toughness or less die outright, while a 4/4 walks away as a permanent 2/2. Because the counters stick, this is a partial reset rather than a Damnation-style erasure. Regeneration does nothing against it, since nothing is being destroyed; indestructible fails too, because toughness is simply subtracted below zero and no destruction event is ever generated. And it slots into the rest of black's -1/-1 counter suite in a way clean wraths never can, layering onto creatures already diminished and stacking with any effect that scales off counters on the battlefield. The cost of that flexibility is a soft kill threshold: two counters reliably clears tokens and mana dorks but does little to a board of larger, resilient bodies, and it makes a poor top-deck when you are staring down high-toughness threats. This is the pruning end of black's removal spectrum rather than the guillotine, a spell that reshapes a board instead of wiping it. The deck that wants it fields either no creatures at all or bodies sized above the threshold, letting the symmetry cut one way while your own board absorbs the two counters and survives.