Make Obsolete
Instant-speed asymmetry is the whole pitch here. A board sweeper that only touches the other side has obvious appeal, but the design pays for that one-sidedness twice: by capping the damage at a single point of toughness, and by making the effect last only until end of turn rather than killing outright. The result is a tempo tool, not a wrath. It clears a swarm of x/1 tokens, breaks up a go-wide attack mid-combat, or shrinks a creature just enough to win a block that would otherwise trade poorly. Because it resolves at instant speed, the timing window is the real lever: held until the opponent commits to an attack or overextends into open mana, it punishes a board state the opponent built for sorcery-speed math. The flip side of the one-point modifier is its ceiling. Anything with toughness greater than one survives, often grown right past the spell by a pump or a counter, and the effect wears off in the cleanup step, so a creature reduced but not killed is back to full stats before the opponent's next turn even begins. That narrows it to environments saturated with small bodies, which is where every effect of this family has always lived: the cheap, one-sided minus-one-minus-one sweep is a recurring answer black reaches for whenever tokens and one-toughness aggro start defining the floor.

