Desolation

A symmetric land-destruction enchantment built around the oldest tension in the game: you have to tap lands to do anything, and this punishes you for doing it. Every end step, the trigger ignores whose enchantment it is; each player who tapped for mana sacrifices a land, and the Plains rider staples a hate-tax aimed squarely at white. The crucial wrinkle is that the penalty is binary, not proportional. Tap one land or tap eight, you lose exactly one land at the end step, so there is no edge in tapping fewer lands on a given turn; that just yields less mana for the same toll. The only ways out of the symmetry are structural: float mana from nonland sources so you never tap a land for it, or arrange your turns so the opponent has to keep developing while you deploy on fewer turns overall. That asymmetry favors a deck that can advance its plan without dirtying its hands on the battlefield every turn. The anti-Plains clause is the era's tell: Visions arrived when white-based decks were a defining force, and the extra two damage to anyone sacrificing a Plains reads as deliberate color-hate bolted onto a Stasis-adjacent prison plan. It belongs to a now-vanished lineage of intentionally symmetric resource-denial enchantments, the kind Wizards has largely retired because the "build a better cage and live in it" gameplay is grindy and brutal to balance. As a relic, it documents black's land-attrition toolkit before targeted, asymmetric removal became the default.