Invasion of Fiora // Marchesa, Resolute Monarch
A double-sided wrath is a strange animal, and this one leans hard into the split. The Siege face is a two-column board sweep sorted by legendary status: clear the small stuff, clear the commanders, or scoop the whole table by choosing both columns. The battle format turns that flexibility into a race, since the Siege arrives with defense counters and an opponent tasked with protecting it. Grinding through those counters to defeat the battle yourself is what converts a one-shot sweeper into a permanent threat. The reward for surviving your own wrath is a Human Noble with menace and deathtouch, a body that trades up in any block and demands to be gang-blocked into oblivion. Marchesa's attack trigger scrubbing counters off any permanent is where her lineage as a counter-hating monarch shows through, quietly stripping planeswalker loyalty or an accumulated stack of +1/+1 counters mid-swing. The upkeep draw is the old dethroned-queen tax: a card in exchange for a life, contingent on nobody having connected with you last turn, which pressures you to keep a board that discourages attacks. The design tension is the through-line: the sweep half wants an empty battlefield, the creature half wants you to hold the last creature standing. Resolve the battle, protect the transformed body, and the wrath that reset the table hands you the win condition it just cleared the way for.
