Active Volcano

A pure hoser, built back when Wizards still believed color hate belonged on a one-mana modal instant rather than tucked into sideboards as scalable answers. The design is austere: two narrow effects stapled together, both pointed at blue, neither doing anything in a mirror or against the other three colors. The bounce mode is the tell. Returning an Island to hand was, in the game's earliest competitive years, a real tempo play against the mono-blue control decks of the day; stripping a land off the board for one mana could buy a turn against Counterspell decks that needed to hit their land drops to hold up answers. The destroy mode covers whatever blue puts on the board, from a Mahamoti Djinn to a blue artifact creature, but only blue: the card is helpless against the colorless and off-color threats those control shells often closed with. What makes it a period piece rather than a template is the symmetry of its hatred. Wizards would later split these effects across cleaner, more flexible cards: Boil for the land-hate axis, Red Elemental Blast and Pyroblast for the permanent-destruction axis. Active Volcano is the modal compromise that tried to be both a Boil and a Blast at once, and committed to neither well enough to be chosen over either.