Burning of Xinye

The land destruction reads like a symmetrical Armageddon, but the symmetry is the trap. You destroy four of your own lands first; only then does the opponent destroy four of theirs, with no clause stopping a player who controls fewer than four from simply blowing up everything available. The asymmetry hides in the deckbuilding: this is a card you cast from a mana base built to survive losing four lands, against an opponent whose tempo collapses when theirs are gone. The trailing 4 damage to each creature is the part that turns a slow resource-denial card into a one-card reset, sweeping away whatever the opponent committed to the board while their land base is being gutted. That combination (mass land destruction plus a board wipe) is rare in a single spell, and the cost reflects it: six mana means you have already invested heavily before the cards behind it pay off. The historical lineage here runs through a tradition of Chinese-history flavored designs that paired devastating effects with self-inflicted costs, the same school of "you suffer first, they suffer worse" engineering that gave red and black some of their most punishing sorceries. The card asks the pilot to accept real pain on their own side of the table in exchange for caving in everything across it, then leaves the survivor of that exchange holding whatever they kept back.