Virtue's Ruin
A color-hosed sweeper, built in the era when Wizards still designed asymmetric board wipes that punished a single enemy color rather than scrubbing the table. The Portal origin matters: that beginner-facing product traded in plain, splashy effects, and "destroy all white creatures" reads cleanly enough that a new player grasps it on first contact. The design discipline is the color restriction itself, which is what lets a three-mana sorcery clear an entire board without touching your own non-white side. That makes it a hate card masquerading as a board wipe: against a deck that happens to be white, it is a one-sided Wrath; against everything else, it is a blank. Black has always paid for its sweepers with some kind of friction (the life loss on Damnation's ancestors, the sorcery speed across the board), and the friction here is the narrowest possible target window, which collapses to nothing the moment the opponent is not playing the right color. It belongs to a family of single-color exterminators that Wizards mostly retired as the game's color philosophy matured: the modern equivalents tend to hit a broader category (artifacts, nonblack, small creatures) rather than naming an enemy color outright. The card preserves a blunter design language, one where reading the opponent's deck and bringing the exact counter was a deckbuilding muscle the cards rewarded directly.


