Toofer, Keeper of the Full Grip
The joke here is that "card advantage" has never been a game term the rules could touch, and this design pins the whole card on formalizing it in the parenthetical. Every experienced player carries an intuitive model of what counts, but no card before had to legislate the concept as an actual trigger condition. So the reminder text does the heavy lifting: it defines card advantage relative to your opponents each time one of your spells resolves, and it slams the door on the obvious loophole by reminding you that tokens are not cards. The examples chosen are deliberately instructive. Divination nets a card and fires cleanly. Annihilate is the classic two-for-one, spending one card to remove a creature and draw a replacement, so it too leaves you ahead by a card. Wrath of God can swing the count enormously if the board was lopsided against you, because a spell that clears more of your opponents' permanents than your own leaves you ahead. That last point matters: the trigger is not a hand-size check but a full-board accounting of who ends up with more cards, which is why a plain cantrip like Opt does nothing here. It replaces itself and leaves the relative count unchanged, so no life is lost. The 2/1 body is beside the point; the card is an accounting rule wearing a creature type. Whether the trigger fires is a genuine judgment call resolved by comparing your relative card count before and after the spell resolves, exactly the kind of fuzzy, group-adjudicated design that only lives in the more experimental corner of the game.
