Vedalken Humiliator
Most mass-removal-by-attack effects settle for tapping down or shrinking a board; this one strips the enemy line to its bare metal. Set the base power and toughness of every creature your opponents control to 1/1 and strip their abilities, and the entire attack step is rewritten: blockers stop trading up, deathtouchers stop killing, protection and menace evaporate, and any creature holding the fort on a keyword now dies to your smallest attacker or a single burn spell. The metalcraft gate is the toll: three artifacts is a low bar in the decks that want this, but it ties a powerful crowd-control effect to a board state you have to actually assemble, which makes the card a payoff rather than a freebie. Note the timing window it exploits. The trigger fires on attack, before blockers are declared, which means the neutering resolves while your opponents are still deciding how to defend. A wall that would eat your attacker becomes a 1/1 chump; a mass of tokens loses whatever anthem-granted keywords made them relevant. And because the effect erases abilities alongside power and toughness, it answers hexproof, indestructible, and ward for the turn, the kinds of protection that ordinary removal cannot touch. The 3/4 body is almost beside the point: the value is in the attack step it hijacks and the defensive math it invalidates for a full turn every time it swings.
