Withering Gaze

Color hate aimed at exactly one opponent, and an artifact of a design philosophy that let cards do nothing against the wrong matchup. The payoff scales entirely off your opponent's green commitment: Forests in hand and green cards in hand, nothing else. Against a deck running no green, three mana buys you a glance at a hand and zero cards drawn. That all-or-nothing wager grows out of Portal's mandate to teach the game through clean, literal effects, where a card could read as a straightforward "punish the green player" line without worrying about generality. The hand-reveal rider is the saving grace: even when the draw whiffs, you have bought perfect information, turning a dead card into an overpriced peek. What makes the design a curiosity rather than a footnote is how narrowly it commits. Most color-hate from this period at least hedged toward playability; this one stakes its entire value on a single axis and accepts that against most of the field it is blank. The effect only coheres inside a sealed teaching environment, where matchups were curated and a green opponent showed up often enough to make the gamble feel like reading the table rather than flipping a coin on the decklist.