Echoing Decay
Removal that scales with how interchangeable your opponent's board is. A single -2/-2 hits the named target; if anything else on the battlefield shares that name, the shrink spreads to all of them at once, for the same two mana. Against a singleton board it is a slightly overpriced minor shrink that often fails to kill anything worth the card. Against four copies of one Myr or a swarm of identically named tokens it becomes a clean instant-speed sweeper. That conditional ceiling is the whole balancing act: the -2/-2 stays modest enough to be fair against a normal deck, and the name clause is the lever that turns it into a blowout only once the opponent has overcommitted to sameness. Instant speed matters more than the rate suggests, letting it ambush a board mid-combat or punish a player who taps out to develop. The card asks a question Magic mostly stopped asking once token and tribal strategies learned to diversify their threats: how redundant are your creatures, really? Engineered Plague and a handful of other name- and type-conscious effects probed the same nerve, all built to hose the decks that win by flooding the board with copies of one thing.


