Acidic Soil

Symmetry is the joke here, and the joke has a sharp edge. Most red burn reaches by pricing the spell in damage to a single face; this one points the effect at the board itself, hitting both players for what their lands are worth and trusting that a control or ramp opponent has stacked more of them than the caster. The asymmetry is built entirely from land disparity: an aggro shell that has emptied its hand and stalled at a few lands takes a scratch while a greedy mana deck eats a haymaker, and because both players keep dropping lands, the gap is widest exactly when a long game has tilted greedy. That inverts the usual burn math, where the aggressor wants the game short. The constraint worth sitting with is that the card rewards the player who has fewer lands than the opponent, or a life-total edge when the counts are tied: it is a tax on greed, not a payoff for ramping. It also clarifies what the card is not. The land-counting only feeds the damage calculation, so this is pure player burn; it touches no permanents, destroys no lands, and answers no creature or planeswalker. Price of Progress works the same lever from the opposite direction, taxing nonbasics rather than total count, but the each-player clause turns this one into a finisher rather than a one-sided punisher.