Evil Presence
Black's earliest answer to attacking mana was not to destroy a land but to overwrite what it is. The effect is total replacement: an enchanted land becomes a Swamp and nothing else, losing every other land type and mana ability it carried. Played on an opponent's Plains, Island, Mountain, or Forest, that converts a source they need into one they may not, choking off whatever color a deck cannot afford to lose. Against a dual land the surgery is sharper still: enchant a Tundra and both white and blue vanish at once, leaving a land that taps only for black. As a sorcery-speed Aura, it announces itself with full warning; the target's controller gets priority in response and can simply tap the land for one last drink before the corruption resolves, so the effect bites hardest as a long-term denial rather than a tempo ambush. Compare Blood Moon, which flips every nonbasic to Mountain at once: this is the single-target version of the same idea, aimed at the one land that matters. The modern game has largely abandoned basic-type matters as a hate axis: lands carry their own subtypes now, fetches search for specific subtypes rather than relying on basics being basic, and most decks no longer lean on a lone source. That is why the effect has never been meaningfully reprinted in black. It survives as a design fossil from a moment when the color's slice of the pie included reaching across the table and changing what your opponent's land was, not merely killing it.














