Maelstrom Pulse

Golgari's answer to the question Vindicate had already half-answered: what if removal didn't care what it was pointed at? Where Vindicate split its versatility across creature, land, and the rest, this trades the land-destruction clause for a piece of upside that reads small and plays large. It destroys the named permanent and every other permanent sharing that name, which turns a single targeted kill into a sweep against anything the opponent has doubled up on: a swarm of identical tokens minted by one source, two copies of a key artifact, an enchantment lock built on redundancy, a board propped up on four-of threats. The catch in the "all permanents with the same name" line is that it reaches both sides of the table, so naming something you also control costs you your own copies, a self-targeting wrinkle that rewards reading the board before you read the spell. What made it the gold-standard catch-all of its era is the absence of restriction: no "creature or planeswalker" hedge, no "you can't target," no exclusions beyond the lands. It answers the artifact, the enchantment, the creature, the planeswalker, the token, with one card at three mana. The sorcery timing is the price: it cannot ambush a combat trick or hold up at the end step, so it asks you to spend your turn proactively rather than reactively. That tradeoff defined a whole lineage of unconditional midrange removal that followed.