Balance

Symmetry that reads as fairness and resolves as anything but. Every resource axis the game tracked in its earliest years (lands, creatures, cards in hand) gets cut to the minimum in a single sorcery, and the floor on each axis is set by whichever player already controls the fewest. The asymmetry comes from the build, not the resolution: a deck that fires this off two lands while running creatures light and dumping its hand early has already established the floors at near-zero for itself, so the spell costs the opponent everything and costs the caster almost nothing. The mana compounds it: two mana, one of them generic, in the color that already owned the best disruption in the game. It has been restricted in Vintage for essentially the entire history of that format and banned in Legacy. The design lineage that followed (Wrath of God's creature-only scope, Armageddon's lands-only scope) reads as Wizards spending decades unbundling what this card did in one printing. The lesson it taught the design team is that symmetry is not fairness: later symmetrical effects built to look even all inherit it, because a symmetrical effect is only symmetrical when both players paid the same setup price to reach it.