Obsidian Charmaw

Punishing a manabase for being greedy is old work, but folding the punishment into a body that also threatens the game is what sets this apart. The cost reduction reads as a scaling tax on colorless-producing lands specifically: when an opponent leans on Tron pieces, Eldrazi temples, or the various colorless-fixing nonbasics that flood powered manabases, the generic portion of the cost collapses fast, bottoming out at the two red pips it can never shed. The enters-the-battlefield clause is the teeth, dismantling any nonbasic on arrival, but the design's real elegance is that it never becomes a dead card. Note that the discount and the destruction key off different conditions: the discount only counts lands that could produce colorless, while the trigger destroys any nonbasic. A shockland-heavy three-color deck full of colored nonbasics offers plenty of targets while yielding no reduction at all; you pay the full five and still take a land with it. Against a deck that runs all basics, the reduction is zero and there is nothing to destroy, but you are holding a 4/4 flier at a fair rate. Land destruction is notoriously feast-or-famine, brilliant against decks that lean on nonbasics and embarrassing against the ones that don't. By pricing the discount off exactly the colorless-mana greed that makes those manabases fragile, this arrives cheapest against the decks it hurts most. A hate card that is never fully dead is a rare thing.