Melt Terrain

Stone Rain has set the price on red land destruction since the color's earliest days: three mana to strip a land and cost an opponent a turn of development. The single extra mana here buys a rider, two damage to that land's controller, and the upcharge almost never earns it back. Killing one land is already a tempo loss in most situations, since you are spending your turn to deny theirs rather than building your own board, and two points to the face does not move the strategic axis: not enough to close a game, not reliable enough to factor into a clock, not free. Land destruction earns its keep when it is cheap enough to chain (Stone Rain into Stone Rain into a threat) or when it hits something irreplaceable; a four-mana single-land kill with a small burn stapled on is too slow for the former and too narrow for the latter. The rider reads like a bonus, but it taxes an effect that was already priced at the edge of playability. What you end up holding is a costlier Stone Rain wearing a coupon: disruption that looks aggressive on the page and plays like a turn spent doing nothing.