Zero Point Ballad
The scalable board wipe is old (Crux of Fate, Damnation, and their kin have long asked black to pay some rate for a clean sweep), but here the X pays twice. It sets the ceiling on what dies, and it sets the life you bleed to do it, so the sweeper's precision and its cost move together: a small X clears tokens and mana dorks for a pittance, while wiping a resolved board of real threats demands a life payment steep enough to matter. That escalating tax is what balances a variable-scale destroy-all. Then the design tucks a reward inside the pain: crest the X to six or more, and the wrath stops being pure attrition and becomes a reanimation spell. A creature you killed (yours or an opponent's, whatever hit the yard from this cast) comes back on your side, which reframes the whole calculation. You are no longer just deciding whether the board is worth clearing; you are deciding whether the board contains something worth clearing for. Pointing the sweep at your opponent's biggest body and stealing it in the same breath is the line the six-toughness threshold exists to enable, and the life loss is the meter it charges you for the privilege.
