Running Is Useless

The genius of an Archenemy scheme card is that it prices its own power in table politics rather than mana, and this one hides its cost inside a single word: "different." Set it in motion and you can wipe out any number of creatures at once, but only if each has a distinct mana value, which turns a would-be board sweep into a puzzle about the board that actually exists. A crowd of dorks and tokens sharing a converted cost of one collapses down to a single kill; a spread of a two-drop, a four-drop, and a six-drop lets you erase the whole spine of someone's plan. The constraint rewards a battlefield with varied curves and punishes symmetry, which means the archenemy player is reading the table's mana values the way a combat-math player reads toughness. It sits in the tradition of destruction effects gated by a sorting rule rather than a color or a target type, closer in spirit to the "one creature of each" clauses than to a flat wrath. That gating is what keeps a free, no-mana-cost destroy spell from being a blank check: the scheme deck already runs on the multiplayer handicap, so the fun is in the selection, not the raw reach.