Boil

Destroying every Island does nothing against four-fifths of the field and ends games against the fifth, and that asymmetry is the entire design proposition. This is not a soft tax or a tempo nudge; it is a strip-mining of an opponent's manabase, and the instant timing is the whole point. Blue control wants to sit behind untapped lands, holding permission until the last possible moment. Held back, this punishes exactly that patience: resolve it on the control player's end step, after they have either tapped out or committed to leaving mana up, and open-ended permission becomes a liability. A sorcery version would telegraph itself and invite a play-around line; instant speed lets you wait for the worst possible moment and choose it yourself. Red has carried a recurring anti-blue land-denial line across its history, from this to Choke's tapping angle and Flashfires turned on Plains, and the design pressure is always the same: give red a leveraged answer to the format's most oppressive permission decks. The bargain runs in one direction. Against any deck not leaning on blue mana, the card sits useless in hand, drawn and never wanted. That is what color-hate asks of a deckbuilder: maximum leverage against one archetype, nothing against the rest, with the variance landing squarely on the player who chose to run it.