Rain of Salt

Land destruction priced for a beginner product, which is the whole story. The Portal pool stripped Magic down to its readable core: no stack, no instants, none of the interaction layers that make competitive play opaque. So its land destruction came as a plain, double-target sorcery at six mana, with none of the disruption-density that made Sinkhole or Stone Rain feared. Two lands for six is a flat rate: it does not scale, does not chain into a lock, does not punish a stumble at the speed real land destruction wants to. The card reads as the genre translated into a simpler grammar, where the lesson is "you can attack an opponent's mana" and the cost is set high enough that the lesson never tips into a strategy. What it documents is a design philosophy more than an effect: the early-product instinct that even a feel-bad archetype like mana denial deserves a representative on the simplest card pool, defanged to the point where it teaches the concept without rewarding it. The double-target clause is the one flourish, a small efficiency over destroying a single land that gives the spell a reason to exist alongside its siblings rather than a reason to see play.