(Farewell | Art by Fuzichoco)

Face My Wrath!

Board wipes. Sweepers. Wraths. That one card that has been the scourge of Standard. No matter what you call them, board wipes are staples of the format that everyone seems to have a tenuous relationship with. People talk about this mythical balance of Commander decks where you need X pieces of ramp, Y pieces of card draw, and Z pieces of removal. Board wipes are part of that conversation, but the answer is a lot less clear. So, what can the history of board wipes tell us about their role in the current Commander meta?

Welcome to Mechanical Memories, the series where we explore the history of Magic’s mechanical design in order to better understand the world of Commander. Today, our subject is board wipes. They’re an essential part of the game. Heck, there are seventy cards tagged as a board wipe in Standard right now, and that number will certainly increase before rotation. Board wipes provide a necessary balance against certain strategies, but they’re still contentious.

First, lets be good academics and define our terms. What exactly is a board wipe? Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite and In Garruk's Wake are both tagged as “sweeper-creature” cards on Scryfall, but they certainly have different roles. One is a hard reset, the other is more of a tool to push through a bunch of tiny creatures. For this, lets look at the crème de la crème of board wipes: Limited Edition Alpha’s Wrath of God. This card acts as a hard reset button for the board, wiping away any creatures (except for ones with indestructible). If that is our standard for a board wipe, what else would we count? Does Dictate of Erebos count as a creature board wipe? Is Kellogg, Dangerous Mind + Dockside Extortionist + Ashnod's Altar a board wipe? How about Legate Lanius, Caesar's Ace? Do I need to stop looking at Fallout cards?

Obviously I’m speaking in hyperbole, but I do feel that it’s important to draw some proverbial lines in the proverbial sand here. For the purposes of this article, I’ll be using the term of a board wipe to mean anything that looks at a section of the board and attempts to remove it.Blasphemous Act, Rampage of the Clans, and Worldfire are all board wipes, but Hex, Galadriel's Dismissal, and Disrupt Decorum are not. That distinction isn’t a perfect one and there’s definitely clauses in the above examples that would break it wide open. For these purposes, it’ll have to do. With that out of the way, let's look at board wipes as a historical piece of Magic design.

Sweeping Up the Competition

Wrath of God was and is the standard for creature board wipes. Four mana and two white pips is the template for most large-scale creature removal cards. Alpha also contained cards like Nevinyrral's Disk and Armageddon, showing that board wipes sometimes targeted things other than creatures. Wrath of God led to the early versions of what would go on to be called control decks. Counterspells kept most creatures off the board and Wrath of God swept up any stragglers. Finish your opponent off with a Braingeyser and that’s the game! 

The four mana rate of Wrath of God was integral to the card’s continued success as it worked as a countermeasure against creature-heavy strategies. For an example, look at typal decks. Most of these tend to have a low curve in order to dump bodies onto the battlefield. The heavy hitters of these decks often fall around three to four mana with cards like Elvish Archdruid, Death Baron, and Goblin Warchief. If you were playing in early Magic, an opponent’s first few turns might be Llanowar Elves, Elvish Mystic,Priest of Titania. That sets up your four mana Wrath of God to knock out all that board development. You’re down one card, your opponent is down three. Who do you think is going to win that game?

That’s also where the controversial elements of board wipes come into play. When board wipes are this efficient, they have a habit of slowing the game down. If a control deck wipes the board, they’re losing the few creatures they might’ve played to wear down their opponent. That’s why decks like Luis Scott-Vargas's UW Tron from Grand Prix Lincoln ran creature lands like Celestial Colonnade alongside a suite of wraths. However, these lands are often fairly mana inefficient and can take a while to close out a game. And that’s in a two-player, twenty life format!

Magic saw a drop off in these kinds of efficient board wipes, with design worrying that an excess of them would damage the health of various formats. Mark Rosewater has said its unlikely they’ll reprint Wrath of God into Standard, considering how efficient that card is. Instead, they’ve looked into more expensive and niche versions of board wipes in order to fill that hole. Take Shatter the Sky and Depopulate, for example. They’re powerful cards, but can reward you or your opponents with card draw. One of my favorite examples is Doomskar. If you really need a fast wrath, this can be an unconditional wrath on turn three. However, you’re paying for that in installments. The four mana, two white pips board wipe seemed to have found its home.

It Was Red And Blue And Green and Black And . . .

But what about other colors? During Planar Chaos, black saw its own version of Wrath of God printed in the form of Damnation. Other colors have gotten similar cards, but with their own unique twist. Dark Ascension saw the printing of Blasphemous Act and Return to Ravnica gave us the infamous Cyclonic Rift. These cards provide widespread removal to other colors.

However, there’s the matter of doing things in ways specific to each color. Black’s Toxic Deluge asks the player to pay life in exchange for removal, while Chandra's Ignition asks for a big creature. Green’s lack of direct creature removal meant it would be hard to design board wipes for the color. Polukranos, World Eater was an attempt at that, but it doesn’t match the unquestionable brutality of Wrath of God. An answer came in Commander 2015 with Ezuri's Predation. Combining two of green’s strengths (tokens and fight effects), this became a solid answer to the green board wipe question.

If green could have a board wipe, all bets were off. Recently, design has gotten much more experimental with their board wipe designs. Their Name Is Death and Phyrexian Scriptures give artifact creatures decks the ability to wipe the slate clean. Doctor Who saw nine new wrath effects printed, including the token-centric Crisis of Conscience. With more and more board wipes in eternal formats like Commander, design is running into the problem of wrath density. These include a certain six mana sorcery. . .

The elephant in the room: Farewell. Players really, really dislike this card for how it presents an unstoppable answer to the majority of the board. This card has made games drag out far beyond their welcome, leaving players’ boards stagnant. The only major permanent type it doesn’t remove is planeswalkers, making the best strategy around it a grindy superfriends approach. As brutal as this card can be to play and play against, I do feel that it has its place. If Farewell was printed a few years back, I think people would be more comfortable with it. The problem is that Farewell was printed as players were starting to understand the utility of board wipes. While Farewell is the best board wipe nine times out of ten, that one in ten chance calls for a more synergistic approach. So, what if we built a deck with board wipe synergies in mind?

Gerrard, Sweeping Specialist

Zack Stella’s art for Gerrard, Weatherlight Hero has made me want to build a deck around him for a long, long time. Now, this is our chance! The problem most players have with board wipes is the fact that they set all players back, leaving the board wipe’s caster without the tools to close out the game. Gerrard is our way of breaking parity. Exiling him allows us to reanimate everything that was lost in our own Wrath of God, giving us the creatures, artifacts, and enchantments to finish off our foes.

Gerrard only reanimates the actual cards that go into our graveyard, so we can’t rely on the classic Boros tokens strategy. At least, not the traditional version of it. Cards that create tokens and can easily die and create more are the kind of fuel that we want to fill up on. Pia and Kiran Nalaar will create Thopters when they enter and can sacrifice artifacts. Anim Pakal, Thousandth Moon will Gnome our opponents whenever we attack. Finally, Spawning Pit can sacrifice our board and allow us to spit out tokens to replace those lost creatures.

But how is Gerrard going to help us? Well, we’re going to build up our board and then wipe it all away! With him on the battlefield, all the permanents that we lost will come right back. Loyal Retainers will sacrifice themselves to reanimate a legendary creature. If we trigger Gerrard that turn, we can bring the Retainers back to do it again! Canoptek Wraith will ramp us and can ramp us again once we reanimate it. Finally, we’re running several non-exile board wipes to trigger Gerrard. Vanquish the Horde, Cleansing Nova, Blasphemous Act. All the classics!

Gerrard will also reanimate lands that hit the graveyard. Fetchlands and Lotus Field allow us to create pseudo-ramp. Lotus Field sacrifices two lands, we bring those lands back with Gerrard. Congrats, you’re now ahead two mana! Because of this, we have some landfall cards like Felidar Retreat to help exploit this. Additionally, Gerrard has some backup. Second Sunrise and Faith's Reward can do the same trick as Gerrard if he has gotten too expensive. Additionally, Gerrard is worded in an easily exploitable way. If we reanimate him before his trigger resolves, we can still reanimate our board without sending him to the command zone! Just use Brought Back prior to the trigger and set up Gerrard to wipe the slate clean again!

I’ve included the decklist for Gerrard, Weatherlight Hero below. He’s a fun, synergistic take on a control deck, but it should be wielded with care. Not all playgroups are going to love this removal-heavy take on a Boros deck. When you play board wipes like this, consider if they’re helping fuel the type of game that you want to play. What are your favorite underrated board wipes? I’d love to hear about them in the comments. Thanks for joining me, I’ll see you next time!

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