Path of Peril

Two board wipes sharing a single block of rules text, with the price line deciding which one you get. Leave the bracketed clause in place and you have a cheap answer to the bottom of the curve: the mana dorks, the aggressive one- and two-drops, the tokens, everything a fast start commits before turn four. Pay the alternate cost and those bracketed words vanish, converting the identical spell into an unconditional wrath that spares nothing. That is cleave doing its structural job: rather than a modal card with two fixed halves or two separate printings, it stores the "narrow but early" version and the "expensive but total" version in one spell, and how much you spend sorts them apart. The tradeoff is legible. The tuned sweeper is efficient precisely because it whiffs on anything of real size, and the mana-value threshold sits low enough to dodge most of what a defensive shell actually fears across the table. The full wipe demands a real premium and a white splash on top of a black base, the tax for holding a single card that answers both a swarm of small bodies and a board of large ones. It is removal that conforms to what the opponent has presented rather than locking you into one failure mode when you draw it against the wrong board.