Wit's End

Total hand disruption sounds devastating until you count the cost: by the time seven mana is available, the opponent has already spent most of what was in their hand, and the cards still sitting there are the ones they were holding back on purpose. The effect empties a hand to zero, but it cannot touch what is already on the battlefield, and it does nothing about the next card drawn. That is the structural problem with one-shot discard at the top of the curve. A turn-one Duress trades one card for one card and shapes the game; this trades a full turn for whatever happens to remain, often a single land and a spell the opponent could not cast anyway. It belongs to a lineage of mass-discard sorceries that treat emptying a hand as a win condition rather than a tempo play, an effect that wants to be paired with draw denial to actually close out a game instead of inconveniencing one turn. Swung late, it is a haymaker: spectacular when it connects against a hand full of answers, embarrassing when the opponent is already in topdeck mode. The seven-mana price is the reason it never settled into a real disruption role; black has always paid a premium for symmetry-free hand annihilation, and this pays it in full.