Famine

Symmetry is the price black pays for board-clearing reach. This sweeps creatures and burns players at the same time, but it does it to everyone, including its caster, which is exactly why it never carried the weight of a clean wrath. Three damage to each player is a real clock when both sides start at twenty, so the spell rewards a deck that has already pushed life totals out of parity: a controlling build that has soaked up damage and stabilized, or an aggressive one that can afford to spend its own life as a resource. The creature-clearing half is the easy part to value; the player-damage half is where the design lives, because it turns a board sweeper into something closer to a reciprocal burn spell that happens to scour the battlefield first. As a five-mana sorcery it sits a tier above the cheap symmetrical effects black has always traded in, asking for a real turn and a real life cushion in exchange for a wider blast radius. The closest cousins are the old symmetrical drainers and damage spells where the clever play is making the symmetry asymmetric: arranging the math so three to the face is lethal for them and survivable for you. Played carelessly it is a coin flip; played in a deck built to win the life race, it is a finisher that resets the ground in the same breath.