Rain of Daggers

A board wipe that bills you for its own work. The destruction is one-sided: only the targeted opponent loses creatures, so your side stays intact while they face the rebuild. The cost is paid in your life total, and it scales with how good a sweep you just got. Hit an empty board and it does nothing for six mana. Catch a wide aggressive deck and the life loss climbs two at a time with every creature it kills, deep enough to leave you on the back foot or dead. That self-billing is the entire design conceit: the effect is asymmetrical in board state but punitive in life, which inverts the usual logic of a wrath, where the symmetry of wrecking both boards is the brake. Here the brake is your own life bar. The Portal line was a teaching ground with simplified rules and beginner-facing wording, and that design language leaned on big, legible effects rather than tight efficiency. This is the philosophy distilled: a sweeper a new player can read top to bottom and understand, with a downside dramatic enough to feel rather than calculate. It reads as the kind of card a teaching set prints to show that powerful effects come at a price, then lets the table discover that the price is sometimes the game itself.