Anger of the Gods

The exile clause is the entire point, and it is what separates this from the long line of three-damage sweepers that came before. Pyroclasm clears the board and fills graveyards; this clears the board and shuts the door behind it. By exiling anything that would die from the damage, it answers the recursion strategies a red sweeper normally feeds: persist creatures never come back, undying triggers fizzle, graveyard value engines find their fuel gone before it arrives. The cost of that upgrade is that the effect is perfectly even-handed. Three to each creature hits your own board exactly as hard as theirs, and against decks built on one- and two-toughness creatures the player who casts it is usually the one who was behind on the ground. That tension defines who actually wants the card: not the deck trading creatures evenly, but the deck with few or no creatures of its own, the one that treats its battlefield as expendable and the opponent's as the problem to be solved. The symmetry is real on the card; the one-sidedness is something the deckbuilder manufactures by refusing to commit a board worth burning. The three-mana price keeps it slow enough that a board can rebuild and narrow enough that toughness-four creatures walk away untouched, but the exile rider buys something no cheaper sweeper offers: permanence against the graveyard.