Last Stand

Every basic land type feeds a different clause, which is the joke and the design statement at once: a five-color sorcery from an era built around the failure of a grand five-faction alliance, this is a war council where everybody shows up with a different weapon and nobody coordinates. The flavor is in the fragmentation. You will never realistically run all five basic types in meaningful numbers, so the card asks which one or two clauses you actually want and treats the rest as dead text printed on the card. Swamps drain the opponent's life total, Mountains burn a creature, Forests build a Saproling board, Plains gain you life, Islands loot (draw, then discard the same count); the mode you get is dictated by your manabase rather than chosen on the stack, which is the real curiosity. A modal spell asks you to pick when you cast it, weighing the board in front of you. Last Stand makes no such offer: it commits you at construction, then does all five things at once, scaled to whatever lands you brought, with no decision left to make once it resolves. That inversion, the effect fixed by deckbuilding before the spell is ever announced, is the wrinkle that sets it apart from the modal cards it superficially resembles. It is a monument to the premise that the alliance was always doomed to pull in five directions, rendered as a card that pulls in five directions and asks you to make peace with most of it whiffing.