Ritual of Soot

The board wipe with a height limit. Where a clean four-mana sweeper like Damnation asks nothing but "destroy every creature," this one draws a line at mana value 3 and lets the top of the curve walk. A resolved five-drop survives; the midrange bomb you slammed last turn sits untouched; the controlling player can cast this without erasing the one creature that mattered to them. Aggro and go-wide strategies live almost entirely below the cutoff, while decks most likely to want a sweeper increasingly stash their threats above it, and that mismatch is what turns a symmetrical reset into an asymmetrical tool. The clause has sharp edges the other way, because it reads mana value rather than the bodies on the table. A vanilla 4/4 token has mana value 0 and dies exactly like a one-drop, no matter how large it looks. An animated manland is a trap in reverse: activation turns the land into a creature with mana value 0, so it dies to this rather than dodging it. The line the card draws sits in the text on the stack, not in the sizes staring across the board. It belongs to a lineage of conditional wraths that trade total coverage for leaving your own work standing, and reading mana value is a cleaner version of that bargain than the toughness-based sweepers that came before it, which forced you to build under an arbitrary size cap rather than an arbitrary cost one.