Sword of the Ages

A one-shot howitzer dressed up as equipment iconography, and among the strangest sinks the early game ever printed. The design contract is brutal: pay six, wait a turn for the tap to come online, then convert as many of your creatures as you choose into a single targeted damage number and lose all of them to exile. Not the graveyard. Exile, in 1994, before exile was a routine zone, on a card that invites you to feed it your battlefield. The math is the trick. Every creature you sacrifice counts only its power, so the card rewards the fattest bodies you can muster and punishes go-wide boards that would rather attack. It is also one of the cleanest examples of the era's all-in artifact: a finisher that cannot be reused, cannot be tutored back, and cannot be split across turns. You build toward one shot, you point it at a face or a problem permanent, and you accept the exile bill. The "Sword" framing is misleading. There is no equip cost, no creature to wear it, no combat interaction at all. The artifact is a charge battery that consumes part of your own army to fire, closer in spirit to the later sacrifice-cannon designs like Goblin Bombardment scaled up to a single colossal activation than to anything in the Sword of X and Y cycle that inherited the name.