Serra's Liturgy

The interesting tension here is between patience and payoff. Most artifact and enchantment destruction of its era priced itself for the moment: pay the mana, blow up the target, move on. This instead asks you to store value over time, ticking up a verse counter each upkeep until the single sacrifice activation can sweep multiple permanents at once. The design is a verse-counter sink dressed as removal, and the friction is built into the waiting: the card sits on the battlefield doing nothing for several turns, visible to every opponent, before it ever answers anything. That telegraphing is the cost. An opponent who reads the board correctly can hold back their key artifact or enchantment until you commit the sacrifice, or simply race the clock you are giving them. What the patience buys is reach no single removal spell offers: a one-shot destroy aimed at three, four, or more targets for a single white mana, the kind of blowout that punishes a deck overextending into artifacts. The verse-counter mechanic itself is the through-line, a flavor and rules motif Urza's Saga used to tie a small cycle together, each card accruing counters toward a scaling effect. Here the result is the slowest, most deliberate version of a sweeper: not a panic button but a standing threat that opponents have to play around for as long as it sits there.