Price of Progress

Symmetry on paper, slaughter in practice: the entire design lives in the gap between those two readings. This deals damage to each player based on nonbasic lands, which means the player casting it builds toward basics and exploits the fact that most decks cannot afford to. Anything running dual lands, shocklands, fetchlands, or a greedy three-color manabase is taxing itself two life per nonbasic every time this resolves, while a deck on pure basics takes nothing. Cast it for one red and a generic and you can routinely deal more damage to an opponent than any straightforward burn at the cost, taking little or none yourself. The genius is that the drawback is real (it loses all reach against opponents who are also on basics) without ever feeling like one, because the kind of opponent worth killing fast is precisely the kind running a painful, color-hungry mana base. It belongs to a small lineage of cards that turn manabase quality into a liability rather than an asset, the burn-deck counterpart to what land destruction does to the same resource: where land destruction attacks the manabase as a tempo play, this attacks it as a life total. The land-greed of modern eternal formats has only sharpened it over time: every premium dual printed since Exodus is, in effect, two more points this card can find, and players keep buying more of them.