Engineered Explosives

Most board wipes ask you to clear everything; this one asks you to choose a number. Sunburst turns the casting cost into a dial: spend one color and it sweeps every nonland permanent that costs one, spend three colors and it sweeps the threes, and the destruction is keyed to a value you set at the moment you cast it rather than to a creature type, a color, or a power threshold. That makes it the rare removal piece that scales with the board it faces, equally happy clearing a swarm of one-drops or unmaking a planeswalker, a Signet, and a token engine that all happen to share a mana value. The cost in colors is the friction: the more precise you want the cut, the more demanding your mana has to be, which rewards multicolor decks and punishes the mono-color player who can only ever set the counter to one or zero. Setting it to zero is its own quiet trick, since plenty of artifacts and tokens have mana value zero and answers to them are scarce. It reads as a colorless artifact anyone can run, but it behaves like a tuned scalpel that demands you read the board and pay for the angle you want, which is why it has outlasted most of its contemporaries as a one-card answer that adjusts to the question.