Grind // Dust
The trick to this split card is that the two halves form a single removal engine separated by a graveyard step, not by a turn. Grind is the setup: a cheap way to seed -1/-1 counters onto a pair of targets, shrinking or killing small creatures outright. Dust is the payoff, castable only from the graveyard, and it cares specifically about the marks Grind left behind, exiling any number of creatures already carrying -1/-1 counters. Aftermath does not gate the two effects to separate turns: with six mana available, you can cast Grind, let it resolve into the graveyard, then immediately cast Dust from there, after which the card is exiled for good. That is the structural pivot the design rests on: the front half does its work on the way to the graveyard, then the same card relaunches once as a mass-removal finisher before leaving the game. The venom is in the verb. Dust exiles rather than destroys, slipping under indestructible and shutting off graveyard recursion on whatever it hits. And it does not care who applied the counters: any persist creature, any wither or infect source, any other generator of -1/-1 counters feeds the same kill window. The reach is wider than Grind's modest two-target front half suggests, because the back half is built to harvest a board that an entire counters-based deck has already been chipping away at.



