Gaea's Balance

Trading five lands for five lands looks like a wash until you read what kind: one of each basic land type, pulled in a single search. That distinction is what justifies the whole sorcery, because it is the cleanest enabler ever printed for cards that count basic land types. Coalition Victory, the Domain mechanic, anything that asks for Plains, Island, Swamp, Mountain, and Forest on the battlefield at once: this gets you there in a single cast, from a deck that never had to run all five colors. The five-land sacrifice is steep, and you come out land-neutral on the swap, but you arrive with full Domain coverage instead of whatever your manabase happened to deliver. It reads as fixing, but it is really a one-card setup engine for a narrow class of effects; outside that class the sorcery does very little. This is the green plumbing underneath a wave of multicolor and domain payoffs from the same era: a way to manufacture the exact board state those payoffs demand without contorting your mana the way fetching five colors normally would. The design tension is honest about itself, converting an entire game's worth of land development into a single enabling beat, priced as a gamble that you have something waiting to cash it in.