Blue Wrath

Wrath of god is one of the coolest, oldest cards in magic. Harkening from a time when Wizard’s wasn’t afraid to put burning pentagrams in their card art and craw wurm was king of the jungle, wrath of god has come to define an entire genre of cards - “wraths”.

In multiplayer EDH wrath effects are usually more efficient than spot removal. Once in a while you’d rather have the surgical precision of removing a particular problem, but usually killing everything gets the job done just as well and puts your opponents down even more cards. With the proliferation of abilities like hexproof and shroud, the wrath is also just generally more reliable than targeted removal.

There is no shortage of sweepers in magic, as each block has offered its own variations on “blow everything up”. In EDH the best wraths either hit a lot of things (disk, o-stone) or deal with indestructible (sudden spoiling, hallowed burial), although a good old fashioned wrath of god is often all it takes to rebalance the board in your favour.

For the most part wraths are heavily concentrated in white and black, with an outside nod to red. Green and blue have a few sort-of-wraths (hurricane, inundate) but are still waiting for their “flock of sheep” or “rain of frogs” to compare with black’s sudden spoiling or white’s humility.

Or are they? Blue actually has a quirky wrath variant... perhaps you’ve seen it?

Ixidron is about as comical as it gets for wrath effects. This weird-looking elephant shrinks the fattest of fatties down to bite-sized pearled unicorns, and itself probably comes out as a 5/5 or better most of the time.

Not to overstate the value of ixidron as a fatty - the body will usually be irrelevant unless you can give him trample, and even then he’s going to shrink rapidly as people smash their 2/2s into one another. In fact Ixidron being a creature could be seen as a disadvantage since it allows other players to animate him out of your graveyard when you least want to see it.

Regardless, 5 mana for a wrath in a colour like blue is very reasonable, and the card itself is pretty amusing.

Macaroni or Cheese?

Ixidron reminds us all of what 4th edition was like, with scathe zombies lined up against grizzly bears. No question, this is a card best boiled, strained and served with spaghetti sauce: