Killing Wave

Most board wipes ask the caster to pay mana for a guaranteed sweep. This one inverts the transaction: it hands every player a per-creature ransom and lets them decide which bodies are worth their life total. The X is a symmetrical threshold, but the symmetry is a feint. A control deck running few or no creatures pays nothing and watches the rest of the table bleed; a go-wide deck with a flooded board faces a life payment scaled to its own success, which is exactly when its life total is most vulnerable to the burn or attack that follows. The result is a sweeper whose cost is borne by the opponent, denominated in the resource a low-curve creature deck can least afford to spend. Because the payment is per creature, the math punishes width brutally: a board of five cheap tokens at X equals four means twenty life to keep them all, so the controller dumps most of them and bleeds for the few they keep. That is the engine. Where it disappoints is against decks running one or two genuine threats: they happily pay to save a single bomb, and you have spent your turn shaving a handful of life rather than clearing the board. The card rewards a precise read on what each creature is worth to its controller, and it scales toward unanswerable against the widest boards, the ones least able to pay for all those bodies at once. A wrath that costs the loser rather than the caster is rare enough that the card has always lived slightly outside the standard sweeper conversation.