Mass Card Removal

In Collectible Card Games and Card Battle Games, players place cards from their hand onto the board to attack and destroy the opponent's cards, trading away card resources into order to eventually attack the opponent directly. These games are often Unstable Equilibriums, as the side with more cards can often trade away even more cards than their opponent, forcing the losing side to face down a seemingly insurmountable army of cards with diminishing resources.

Knowing that these scenarios exist, many card games will often implement the ultimate Comeback Mechanic to ramp up the games' intensity: removing everything. Or at least making a good go at it. Colloquially known as a "board wipe", which will be used from here on for simplicity.

Acting as a Reset Button for the game state in card games, board wipes are card effects that damage or destroy all cards on one or both player's fields. If used strategically, they can single-handedly trade away large amounts of enemy cards, dramatically shifting the tide of the game.

Depending on the way the game is designed (e.g. the presence or lack of a card "health" system), mass removal may take the form of mass damage or direct removal (by destruction, returning to hand/deck, or sending the cards to a Deader than Dead zone).

Due to their high power, these board wipes are often costly themselves, but they will usually specialize themselves into specific strategies and be easily achievable in those circumstances, making them effective as comeback tools.

Compare with Area of Effect, the non-card game version of this trope. Unlike AOE attacks in games set in 2D or 3D maps which require targeting physical locations, positioning is usually a non-issue in card games. Board wipes in card games typically target categories of on-field cards rather than cards in specific geometric locations.

Related to Mass Teleportation due to both working on a large number of targets and targeting an area instead of just a person. A type of Weapon of X-Slaying where X is "things in a location", and also a type of Smart Bomb. While intended as Comeback Mechanics, if board wiping effects are improperly balanced by being too cheap or too abusable, they can often be perceived as Game Breakers.

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Examples:

Tabletop Card Games

• Magic: The Gathering: There have been many limited boardwipers, with targets ranging from all creatures, all nonland permanents, then there's the ones that aim for absolutely everything, and effects ranging from destruction, bouncing, sacrificing, or even exiling:
  • Tries to clear the board:
    • Worldfire: Resets the board to empty, except the Exile zone.
    • Balance forces all players to discard cards and sacrifice creatures and lands until they control the same number as the player with the least amount of cards in hand/creatures/lands, which can be 0. But it has no effect on artifacts or enchantments.
    • Oblivion Stone: Destroy everything on the board except specially marked things on the board, marks that only it can generate, at a 4 mana cost and disabling the card for the turn or until reenabled, whichever happens first.
    • Decree of Annihilation will exile all artifacts, creatures and lands from the battlefield, all cards from all graveyards, and all cards from all hands. And even if it is "merely" cycled, it destroys all lands.
  • "Destroy all artifacts, creatures, and lands":
    • "Jokulhaups" does just that.
    • "Obliterate" can't be countered.
  • Nevinyrral's Disk: Destroy all artifacts, creatures, and enchantments.
  • Fracturing Gust removes all artifacts and enchantments.
  • Creature-killers:
    • Wrath of God / Damnation, an orb of white / black that's floating above a few or many people being Reduced to Dust, respectively, and costing 2 of any mana and two mana of the aforementioned colors. They destroy all creatures and prevent them from regenerating.
    • Flamebreak deals 3 damage to each creature without flying and each player.
    • Pyroclasm deals 2 damage to each creature.
    • Starstorm:
      Starstorm deals X damage to each creature.
  • Actifact-focused:
    • Shatterstorm destroys everyone's Artifacts.
    • Furnace Dragon will exile every artifact if summoned from the hand.
  • Tranquility destroys everyone's Enchantments.
  • Only affects lands:
    • Armageddon: Destroy everyone's lands
    • Ajani Vengeant: Destroy all of someone's lands.
  • Aether Flash only removes all Token Creatures and Counters from permanents.
  • Mana Value Seeking wipers:
    • Pernicious Deed: Sacrifice Pernicious Deed: Destroy each artifact, creature, and enchantment with mana value X or less.
    • Engineered Explosives can only affect cards of typically 5 or less mana value, unless an effect to add more charge counters to it applies, since "This enters the battlefield with a charge counter on it for each color of mana spent to cast it." and there's only 5 colors.
      Sacrifice Engineered Explosives: Destroy each nonland permanent with mana value equal to the number of charge counters on Engineered Explosives.
• Android: Netrunner: Trashing is the word for removing from the game into a "dead card" zone. Location cards host program cards, and most trash effects only trash one card at a time, but the London Library trashes all cards that are still hosted on it at the end of its player's turn. Which could be a lot of programs, making this a downplayed mass removal since it's not guaranteed to be "mass".
• Pokémon: Togepi & Cleffa & Igglybuff-GX's Supreme Puff-GX clears the opponent's bench back into their deck if there's 16 Fairy Energy on the group when the attack goes off.
• Sentinels of the Multiverse: Hero cards that stick around for more than one turn are usually tagged as Ongoing or Equipment. Most villains can only destroy a few cards at a time, but some other villains are much nastier:
  • Citizen Dawn's Devastating Aurora is the most infamous, often just referred to as That Card. It wipes out all hero Ongoing and Equipment cards and also all Environment cards.
  • Omnitron has three cards that qualify. Sedative Flechettes destroys all hero Ongoing cards, Technological Singularity destroys all hero Equipment cards, and Terraforming destroys all Environment cards. The former two simultaneously deal damage while the latter gives him extra plays equal to the number of cards destroyed.
  • Baron Blade puts a twist on the concept by letting you choose how many of your cards he's going to destroy, but the more cards you keep the harder he hits you later.
  • Miss Information has a similar effect. She also has another card that forces each player to choose between destroying all their cards or discarding their entire hand.
  • Apostate's Apocalypse cards destroys all cards other than Relics (which his deck specializes in). The only reason they’re not nastier than Devastating Aurora is that there's a delay before they activate. Fanatic’s End of Days is a heroic version.
  • The Ennead, Chokepoint, and Kismet all have cards that destroy all Environment cards for some benefit, but they can't do the same against hero cards.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh!, many cards have effects that destroy all cards or monsters on the opponent or both player's board. However, even more powerful than those are cards that banish all cards or send cards on the field to the graveyard, because many monsters often have immunity to being destroyed but are not immune to banishment or sending.
  • Spell that destroys all monsters on a side of the field:
    • Raigeki destroys all monsters the opponent controls.
    • Dark Hole destroys all monsters on the field. Formerly less useful than Raigeki due to affecting the player who uses it, but Power Creep has caused Dark Hole to see a rise in usage to deal with monsters that end up on their opponent's board for some detrimental effect, such as Destiny HERO - Dark Angel and Knightmare Corruptor Iblee.
  • Black Rose Dragon is a Synchro Monster that gives its controller the option to destroy every card on the field, including itself, when it is Synchro Summoned.
  • Divine Arsenal AA-ZEUS - Sky Thunder is a Rank 12 Xyz Monster that can send all cards on the field besides itself to the Graveyard as a Quick Effect by detaching 2 Xyz Materials. If that weren't enough, it doesn't even have a once per turn or even once per Chain restriction on its effect, allowing it to dodge negates by simply activating its effect again in response, material permitting.
  • Inferno Tempest is a Quick-Play Spell Card that banishes all monsters in both players' Decks and Graveyards, but can only be activated when taking 3000 or more damage at once.
  • Topologic Zeroboros is a LINK-4 Link Monster with a mandatory effect to banish all cards on the field when a monster is Special Summoned to a zone a Link Monster points to. While it also banishes itself, it will also Special Summon itself back from being banished the turn after it is banished by its own effect.
  • Nibiru, the Primal Being is a monster with a Quick Effect in the hand that can be activated if the opponent Summons 5 or more monsters in a single turn and Tributes every monster on the field to Special Summon itself to its owner's field, as well as a Primal Being Token to the opponent's field with stats equal to the combined ATK and DEF of the monsters removed by its effect. This card primarily exists to punish players going first from overextending into boards without some form of protection.
  • Evenly Matched: An incredibly powerful mass removal "hand trap", which forces the opponent to banish cards they control face-down until they control the same amount of cards as the player. By being able to be activated from the hand on an empty board, doing so will force the opponent to banish all but 1 of their cards (as the player controls Evenly Matched on the field at resolution).

Digital Card Games

• Card City Nights:
  • In the first game, some cards will remove all placed down cards when part of an attack combo:
    • Princess Pitch DX, since the card is based off of a apocalyptic attack in her home game.
    • Mildagard DX
  • In the second game, when Alpha Strike resolves and therefore leaves the board, it takes out all other cards with it, except one randomly chosen survivor.
• The Elder Scrolls: Legends has several cards that perform mass wipes: The Red Year deals 10 damage to each creature which is more than enough to kill most creatures, Dawn's Wrath destroys all creatures in one of the two lanes, and Alduin, who destroys all other creatures regardless of lane.
• Board clears in Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft come in two varieties: cards that deal a certain amount of damage to all minions, and cards that destroy or remove minions directly. Class identity is a big deal in Hearthstone, so every class has their own unique way of keeping the board clear — with Druids, Hunters, Paladins, and Rogues being in part characterized by a relative lack of board clears instead.
  • Raw damage board clears:
    • Mage goes the Boring, but Practical route, featuring simple "deal X damage to all enemy minions" for the most part. Other board clears involve shooting damaging missiles at random enemies — great against a board of 1-health minions, but not so useful against a board of 4-health minions.
    • Shaman has much like Mage, but they can be played much earlier. However, they have an Overload cost to them, causing the Shaman to have X less mana on the following turn. Early on, Shaman AoE also dealt variable damage, although this was dropped in an attempt to iron unfun RNG out of the game.
  • Unconditional minion destruction:
    • Deathwing, a 12/12 minion for 10 that destroys all minions, but also requires you to discard your entire hand.
    • Warlock's Twisting Nether, an 8-mana spell that simply destroys all minions.
  • Demon Hunter board clears generally involve summoning a number of tokens that can attack minions immediately. This gives them the most flexibility where the damage goes, but the least overall damage per board clear. They also have a handful of straight damage Area of Effect spells that hurt their own minions as well.
  • Priest has the most effective, most efficient, and most expensive board clears, with their AoE rarely costing less than 7 mana but almost always leaving the board empty. They also have a light theme of stealing minions or Manipulating the Opponent's Deck with some of their effects.
  • Warlock likewise has cheaper board clears than other classes, but they come with even worse downsides like discarding cards, damaging your own hero, or removing cards from your deck.
  • Warrior board clears are cheap and plentiful but much less effective per card, often requiring them to combo several cards together to answer boards. They're also always symmetrical, which is actually more of an upside since many Warrior cards benefit from damaging their own minions.
• MARVEL SNAP: There are a number of cards that can remove mass amounts of cards, both on your side or the opponent's. Removing your own cards can have a benefit, as a maximum of 4 cards per player can be on each of the three locations, and certain cards have beneficial effects upon removal:
  • Killmonger destroys all cards on the board that have a base cost of 1 on both sides, making him this trope against zoo decks.
  • The Destroyer destroys all cards on the board on its player's side, in exchange for having a massive 15 power for its 6 cost.
  • Galactus takes things even further — when his effect successfully triggers, he removes the two locations he isn't on from the game and destroys all cards on them, even if they are invulnerable to destruction or if the location was locked down by Professor X. However, to trigger this effect upon reveal, he needs to be the player's only card on the location while having more power there, and his rather weak base power of 5 for his 6 cost means it requires good preparation to pull off successfully.
• Plants vs. Zombies: Heroes:
  • Tactical Cuke is a Plant Trick destroys all Plant and Zombie teammates that are on ground lanes.
  • Doom-Shroom is a Plant Trick destroys all Plant and Zombie teammates with 4 power or more.
  • Zombot 1000 is a 9/9 Zombie Teammate that destroys all Plant teammates when played. The Plant hero can still recover as Plants play both Teammates and Tricks after the Zombies play their teammates (but before the Zombies play Tricks), but will have no such luck if it's brought out via Teleport on the Zombie Tricks phase.
  • Weed Spray is a Zombie Trick that removes all Plant teammates with 2 or lower strength.
• Shadowverse features many followers and amulets that inflict damage to all enemy followers. An example of a straight board wipe card is Themis's Decree, which destroys all followers.