Devastate

Five mana to blow up a single land has never been a rate worth chasing, and the small board sweep stapled on top is the tell that the designers knew it. The pinging damage is doing two jobs at once: it cleans up the smallest creatures the way a Pestilence tick would, and it pressures both players' life totals as a thematic nod to an era built around hardship and attrition. But the math fights itself. The same one damage that mops up your opponent's mana dorks also hits your own creatures and your own face, so the card is rarely a clean blowout. Land destruction in red usually lives at three mana with Stone Rain as the benchmark, or trades up for tempo with Pillage; pricing the same effect at five and bundling a symmetrical sweep on top is a design that asks you to want both halves at once and accepts that you almost never will. Two reasonable effects glued into one expensive sorcery, the kind of midrange-disruption tool that looks like value on paper and plays like a hand-clogger in practice. It is a fair record of where land destruction sat in red's early-era toolkit: still printed freely, still overcosted, and still searching for a reason to exist alongside cheaper, cleaner answers.