Terror Tide

Fathomless descent counts only permanent cards in your graveyard, and that single word does most of the design work: it quietly divides black's grindy shells into ones that can cast this and ones that can't. Fill the yard with instants and sorceries and the sweep sits dead in hand; fill it with spent creatures, cracked artifacts, and used-up lands and every one becomes a point of minus. So the wipe is a payoff for a specific attrition style rather than a generic reset, and it scales asymmetrically: a deep-enough count clears an aggressive board while your engine keeps churning, and against go-wide it can erase everything for four mana. Black has printed magnitude-scaling sweepers before, from the Infest line onward, but those priced their size in mana or fixed it at a flat number. This one pins the wipe to a resource you were already accumulating, which means the ceiling is a deckbuilding question, not a mana question. And because the count is permanent cards, not permanents, tokens are a trap here: they cease to exist when they hit the graveyard, so cracking a board of Blood or Treasure tokens on the stack does nothing to deepen the sweep. What feeds X is real cardboard: fetched-and-cracked lands, sacrificed creatures with printed names, artifacts you've spent. Undersized against a shallow yard, oppressive once the count runs deep, it rewards the resource-hungry decks that already leave real permanents behind.