Desert Twister

Green's original answer to "destroy anything," and the design template the color has been negotiating with ever since. Six mana with two of them colored, sorcery speed, no restriction on target: the rate is deliberately ugly, because the breadth of the effect is the entire point. Green already owns enchantment removal and land destruction outright; what Desert Twister grants on top of those is the part the color is not supposed to have cheaply, namely unconditional creature destruction and a clean answer to planeswalkers. The cost is the tax for bundling all of it into one spell with no caveats. Every wide green removal spell printed since has been a riff on this baseline, almost always trading mana for a restriction or a restriction for mana. Desert Twister itself kept the cost and kept the breadth, and the design has not aged so much as been parceled out: Krosan Grip narrowed the target and dropped the cost, Beast Within added a token and dropped the cost further, Plummet and Naturalize carved off the categories green was always entitled to. The card now reads as a museum piece, but it is the museum piece the rest of green's toolbox is built around. When a new green removal spell gets previewed, the question designers are answering is some version of "how much of Desert Twister are we giving back this time, and what is the player paying for it."