Whelming Wave
A mass bounce spell with a tribal carve-out, and the carve-out is the entire point: Krakens, Leviathans, Octopuses, and Serpents stay put while everything else, including your opponent's board and your own non-sea-monster creatures, goes back to hand. This is a one-sided tempo swing dressed as a symmetrical reset, but only for a deck built to honor the exemption list. The four named creature types are the deep-water tribes that almost never share a battlefield by accident, so in practice this clears blockers off the path of a lone enormous swimmer while resetting the opponent's developed board to square one. The design logic is straightforward and a little wry: rather than printing a Cyclonic Rift that bounces everything, this asks you to earn the asymmetry by committing to creatures most decks would never run, then pays you with a sweeper that leaves your finisher untouched and swinging. It is the rare board wipe that wants you to have a creature in play before you cast it, and the rarer one whose effectiveness scales directly with how committed you are to a niche the rest of the format ignores.




