Oblivion Stone
Colorless access to a clean sweep is the structural problem this card was built to solve. Nevinyrral's Disk gave artifact decks a board reset years earlier, but it arrived tapped and could not discriminate; everything went, every time. The fate counter mechanic is the answer to that bluntness: it lets the controller pre-tag the permanents that survive the detonation, turning an indiscriminate wrath into a selective one. The cost is steep and the loop is slow (the sweep itself runs five mana and the sacrifice, and protecting a permanent costs another four and a separate activation), so the asymmetry is rented rather than free. That deliberate friction is what kept it honest in heavy-artifact and ramp shells: you commit a turn's worth of mana to set up a one-sided board wipe rather than getting it on tap. What makes the design durable is that it sits in any color's manabase, which means strategies with no white in them at all gained a mass-removal button they could not otherwise field. The fate counter wrinkle also rewards patient play: a planeswalker, a Worldgorger-style engine, a key creature can be insulated in advance, so the board state after detonation is something you authored rather than something you survived.








