Nevinyrral's Disk

The original sweeper, and the template against which every board wipe is calibrated. The design is a study in friction: a four-mana artifact that arrives tapped, then demands its own activation cost to fire, and gives every opponent a full turn cycle to kill it, sacrifice their best threats in response, or simply untap and swing. That delay is the entire balancing act. Wrath of God shared the same early printing window and priced a narrower effect at four mana, sorcery speed, no setup, no artifact-removal vulnerability, and the comparison has framed the conversation about sweepers ever since: how much do you pay, and in what currency (mana, tempo, color, fragility), to wipe a board? The Disk pays in tempo and fragility, and in exchange it asks for no colored mana and lands in any deck that can cast a four-drop. The recurring design problem it created (a colorless reset button available to every archetype) has been managed carefully across decades, with successors like Oblivion Stone, Perilous Vault, and Meteor Golem turning the dials in different directions while the core question stays fixed. The name itself is a wink rather than a misprint: "Nevinyrral" is "Larry Niven" spelled backward, a deliberate dedication to the science-fiction author whose Ringworld novels lent the card its sense of cosmic machinery. The proofreading on a card this old is suspect; this particular spelling was on purpose.