Smash to Dust

Modal removal usually spends its extra text buying flexibility across threat types; this one spends its text buying flexibility against a very specific spread of them. Artifact destruction, wall removal, and a one-damage board sweep against opposing creatures are three effects that rarely appear on the same card because they rarely matter in the same game. That is the tell: this is not built to be good against everything, it is built to almost always have one relevant line while never being dead. Look at the middle mode. Dedicated hate for creatures with defender is a niche so narrow it typically lives in a sideboard, if it gets a slot at all, but tucking it into a modal card costs nothing to carry: when no wall is on the table, the artifact mode or the sweep mode is still live. Each option is deliberately undersized on its own (a Shatter effect, a sweep that clears only the flimsiest X/1s, a removal spell that answers exactly one keyword), and the modality is what makes the sum worth a card rather than any individual line. The design raises a card's floor instead of its ceiling: it hands red a cheap, low-commitment answer to a cluster of problems the color would otherwise have to spend real slots addressing one at a time.