Armageddon

Four mana, and the resource layer of the entire board resets to zero. The brutality is in the symmetry: the spell hits the caster's lands too, and that mutual destruction is the whole engine. The player who has already deployed threats walks away from the rubble with a board and a clock; the opponent walks away with nothing but a hand of spells they cannot cast. That asymmetry-from-symmetry has defined a school of white strategy for thirty years: get ahead on board, then burn down the table's ability to respond. Every mass-land-destruction effect to follow has paid a tax to exist alongside it. Ravages of War is the functional reprint Wizards kept out of premier sets; Cataclysm, Wildfire, and Boom // Bust all reach for the same effect with a restriction (creatures too, artifacts too, one land each) that makes the rate easier to stomach. The unrestricted version has stayed scarce, kept off common rarity and out of most modern premier sets, because mass land destruction collapses the social contract of multiplayer games and produces non-games in two-player formats whenever the caster is even slightly ahead. It remains the permanent benchmark for how much symmetry a four-mana white sorcery is allowed to break: not this much, not anymore. Its lineage runs through every white prison and stax shell ever built, and through the design conversation about why fair mass disruption now costs more, hits less, or asks for something in return.