Cave-In

Two damage to every creature and every player reads as a modest sweep, the kind of effect that usually costs three or four mana and never warrants attention. The pitch clause is what reframes it: exile a red card from hand and the printed five-mana sorcery becomes free, a board wipe that can land on a turn when the lands were never there. That swap turns a clunky rate into a tempo weapon, and it bins itself into a graveyard red strategies are increasingly happy to stock. The symmetric burn to each player is the catch worth respecting as much as the creature sweep: it can finish you from the wrong side of a race just as readily as it stabilizes your own board, so firing it free still demands arithmetic on your own life total. It belongs to a family of early-era spells that billed themselves in cards rather than mana, the same accounting that powers Force of Will and Pyrokinesis, here pointed at a sweeper instead of a counter or a single removal target. What separates it from a slow Pyroclasm is the choice itself: the printed cost is the floor, the pitch is the ceiling, and the design assumes you rarely want to pay either on its own terms.