Vicious Rivalry

Board wipes usually charge you in mana; this one charges you in a resource you can actually run out of. The mana cost stays fixed at four, but the size of the sweep rides on X life, and every point you spend raises both the ceiling of what dies and the toll for getting there. Set X to two and you clear the early clutter for a trivial nick off your life total; set X to six and you are hemorrhaging real resources to answer the top end. That sliding scale turns a wrath into a negotiation with your own life total, and the tension is real: the biggest threats demand the deepest payment, so the sweep costs the most exactly when you need it biggest. It catches artifacts alongside creatures, widening the coverage past a pure creature wipe, but the mana-value-or-less clause is unforgiving in both directions. Nothing above the line dies by accident, and nothing at or below it survives on either side of the table, including your own board unless you have deliberately built above the chosen X. This is the Golgari read on mass removal: black supplies the life-as-currency ethos, green supplies the fat top end that can weather a sweep aimed under it, and calibrating X means reading your own board's mana values as precisely as your opponent's before deciding how much of yourself to burn.