Le Gommage and the Pictos

Type: Token

Rarity: Token

Mana Cost: —

Color Identity: Colorless

Reminder card. LE GOMMAGE: at the beginning of your upkeep, the Paintress paints a number. Exile each creature with that mana value, from every battlefield. The number decreases by one each turn. The number starts at 8, it is public, and it is tracked with gommage counters on The Monolith; Le Gommage happens once during each of your upkeeps, however many permanents carry it.

It DESCENDS and it fires every single turn on a value it has NAMED — 8, then 7, then 6 — and it takes your board as readily as anybody's. It is not a clock climbing toward one explosion at a threshold, and it never triggers on a threshold: it executes an announced slice. Once the number has passed a value, that value is safe for the rest of the game — so in this deck a card's mana value is a date, and the whole craft is knowing how old your creatures will be when the number reaches them. Age counters move a creature UP the list, out of the number's way, permanently.

PICTOS: at the beginning of your upkeep, if a Picto has been attached to the same creature since your last upkeep, put a lumina counter on it. On the third lumina counter the Picto is Mastered: for the rest of the game each creature you control has the ability above, then the Equipment unattaches and is freed — it may be attached again, but it will never earn another lumina counter. A Picto costs TIME BORNE, not a death, and what it teaches belongs to the whole deck, not to the creature that wore it. Equipment has no mana value the Paintress can name, which is why the Pictos are the only thing in Lumière that survives the year.

“The number is painted a year in advance, in figures four metres tall, where everyone can read it.”

Single card from the CLAIR OBSCUR: EXPEDITION 33 (Le Gommage) Commander deck. Sold individually.