Five strength. That is the gate on a straight banish for three ink.
World's Greatest Criminal Mind reads: Banish chosen character with 5 ¤ or more. No challenge. No damage. You point at something big and it is gone. The question is whether the floor is narrow enough to matter, and the answer is that five strength covers most things worth banishing in the first place.
- Three ink, no singer required. Any character with cost 3 or more can exert to sing it for free.
- Straight banish, no damage. Resist does nothing here. If the target has 5 strength or more, it is gone.
- You can set up the shot. Force of a Great Typhoon can push a target above the threshold before you fire.
- Counterplay goes after your singers, not the song. Actions resolve and leave. Banish the character who would sing it.
The brief is right that nothing else in the core set does this at this cost. That is itself the story.
What the five-strength floor actually cuts out
Strength of five sounds like a narrow gate. In practice, most of the characters you most want removed are already there. Lorcana's late-game threats tend to trade willpower for strength, and anything big enough to threaten your board in the challenge step usually qualifies. The characters you would pay three ink to remove are generally the ones this hits.
Where it does not reach: aggressive small bodies, cheap looters, and anything built around lore rather than fighting. A one-strength quester sitting behind a blocker does not care about World's Greatest Criminal Mind at all. If your opponent is winning through a swarm of low-cost characters, this card sits in your hand doing nothing.
So name the condition. This card earns its spot when you are looking at a specific threat, a character big enough to swing challenges and tall enough to survive one. Against a deck that goes wide with cheap bodies, you are likely holding a removal spell for a target that never shows up.
It is a song
That matters more than it might look. A character with cost 3 or more can ⟳ to sing this song for free. Cost 3 is not a high bar.
Most decks above the curve have singers sitting around by mid-game, and that means you often play this for nothing. The three-ink cost tends to act as a ceiling rather than a price you always pay.
Songs also resolve before anyone can respond by challenging the character that sang them. Your singer exerts, the song resolves, the target is banished. There is no window where removing the singer unravels the song already in motion.
Your singer exerts, the song resolves, the target is banished.
Which brings up the only real counterplay: opponents who know this is in your deck will try to keep your potential singers off the board before you can use them.
The song itself resolves and goes to discard the instant you play it. There is nothing to remove. The disruption has to happen upstream, against the characters who would do the singing (rules 6.1.13.4, 6.6.1.1).
Setting up the shot
Here is the part that changes how you build with this card.
The target has to have 5 strength or more. But "chosen character" is not restricted to your own. Force of a Great Typhoon can push strength onto an opposing character, and if that pushes them above the threshold, World's Greatest Criminal Mind can now legally banish them.
That is a two-card answer to a target that was previously out of reach, and it is verified against the rules.
Is it clunky? Yes. Two cards to remove one character is a real cost. But if that character is the entire engine of your opponent's deck, the investment makes sense. This is speculation on my part, but I think this combination will show up in games where the target is so format-warping that any price is worth paying.
How Resist interacts with this
Not at all. World's Greatest Criminal Mind does not deal damage. It banishes directly. Resist reduces damage dealt to a character (rule 1.9.2.1 governs what counts as dealt damage).
A banish effect of this kind does not touch that layer, because no damage is involved. A character with Resist is not protected here. If it has 5 strength or more, it leaves the board.
Where it stops working
Two conditions banish this card's usefulness.
First: your opponent goes wide with small bodies. Nothing on the board hits the strength floor, and World's Greatest Criminal Mind does not have a backup mode. It does not draw a card. It does not deal damage. It banishes one big character or it does nothing.
Second: your singers get removed before you can use them. The three-ink free-sing is the whole efficiency argument. If your opponents are aggressive about clearing your board, you start paying full price for a conditional removal spell, and three ink for a narrow banish is a harder sell.
Neither of these is fatal. They just mean you should know going in when this card is good and when it is not.
Play it when the board has specific threats worth naming
If your opponents are running characters that hit the floor, and your deck has natural singers at cost three or above, this earns a slot. It is efficient, it bypasses Resist entirely, and the singer mechanic means your tempo loss is usually zero.
If you are already running World's Greatest Criminal Mind and finding it stranded in hand, the problem is probably the targets, not the card. Look at what your opponents are actually playing and ask whether the strength floor is matching reality. That answer tells you whether to keep it, cut it, or adjust your read on the format.
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