Genesis Ultimatum
The final card in the Ultimatum cycle to resolve into a full-board explosion rather than a targeted effect, and the one that reads most like a payoff for building your whole deck around it. Seven mana across a three-color pip requirement is the constraint that pays for the ceiling: you are not casting this off two lands, and by the time you can, the game state is either yours to break open or already lost. The permanents skip your hand entirely and arrive on the battlefield, so the variance runs the other way from most card advantage. A hit-heavy top five turns into a swing that no seven-mana spell has any right to produce; a whiff still refills your hand, but a refill was not the point. The design leans on that tension deliberately: a deck packed with impactful permanents accepts the occasional dead flip as the cost of the good ones. It also plays cleanly with any permanent that wants to enter without being cast, since everything it drops sidesteps counterspells aimed at the stack. The self-exile clause is the honest tax; there is no rebuy, no recursion loop baked in, which keeps it a one-shot haymaker rather than an engine.







