Invasion of Lorwyn // Winnowing Forces

The removal here reads your board twice, and that repetition is the design's engine. On the way in, it destroys an opposing non-Elf creature with power equal to or less than your land count, so the same development that fuels your game plan sets the ceiling on what you can kill: a full board answers something huge, a rushed one clears a mana dork. The non-Elf clause is the pointed restriction, and it aims the removal squarely at the decks you are not: a spell for an Elf shell to swing against everything else, cutting down the creatures a non-tribal opponent leans on while your own board stays untouched. It is the wrong tool against another Elf deck, and that asymmetry is exactly the identity being drawn: a tribe that answers outsiders and ignores its own. Battle as a card type is its own experiment (a permanent your opponent is nominally defending, a defense counter the whole table can chip at), and this is one of the cleaner uses of it, because both faces do work you want. Kill something on the front, then flip into Winnowing Forces, whose power and toughness each track your land count, so the payoff for the resource that fueled the removal is a body that keeps growing as the game goes long. The back half rewards the exact texture of deck the front half was written to defend: heavy on lands, wanting to attack, built around Elves. One card that consults your land count once to remove a threat and once to become one.