Desecrated Earth

Single-target land destruction has a structural problem that no rider quite fixes: by the time you can sink five mana into one, the land you blow up has usually already paid for itself, and Stone Rain set the rate baseline at three mana for a reason. The discard clause is the lever this design pulls to justify the markup, turning a card-neutral Stone Rain into a two-for-one: you trade your sorcery for their land and a card from hand, which is genuinely more than the bare effect offers. The problem is conditionality. The rider only earns its keep when there is something to strip. Against a full grip it can pick off a key piece while setting the opponent back a land drop; against an empty hand it does nothing extra and collapses back into an overcosted Stone Rain. That swing between modes is what keeps the card on the margins. It belongs to a long line of "land destruction plus a kicker" experiments black and red ran through the mid-era of the game, most of which bolted a second clause onto a single-target Stone Rain effect hoping to clear the rate problem that makes targeted land destruction a fringe plan to begin with. The discard is the more interesting half of the card; the destruction is the part that keeps it from being worth casting.