Lava Flow

Stone Rain and Disintegrate, fused at a price that admits the design's whole purpose: this is a removal spell built for players who were never expected to have anything else. Portal was the beginner-facing product, stripped of instants, of the stack, of most of the mechanical vocabulary that defines the game's depth. In that context a sorcery that simply destroys a creature or a land, with no fine print and no conditions, is the correct teaching tool. The five-mana cost and the lack of any rider are not clumsiness; they are the deliberate flatness of a card meant to be legible to someone reading their first rulebook. What that flatness obscures is how much the card actually does. Unconditional destruction that can point at either a threat or a mana source is rare in any color, and red rarely gets to touch creatures and lands with the same spell. The friction is entirely in the rate: five mana at sorcery speed for a single removal effect is a price no competitive deck wants to pay when Stone Rain costs three and creature removal comes cheaper still. So the card lives where its breadth matters more than its efficiency, a one-card answer to two unrelated problems for the cost of never being efficient at either. It reads as a relic of a product line designed to introduce the game, which is exactly what it is.